Speaking further on the subject of Government protection, Mr. Angell says: “Surveyors appointed under the Towns Improvement Clauses Act were protected during the existence of the General Board of Health. Sir C. Adderley’s Public Health and Local Government Bill of 1872 proposed similar protection. Officers employed under the Poor Laws are fully protected as to position, emoluments, and superannuation. The administration of the Poor Laws and the Public Health Acts is now united in one department under the newly established Local Government Board: it is therefore in my opinion equally due to Local Board officers, that they also should be recognised and protected. Without such protection, sanitary legislation cannot, in the words of the Royal Sanitary Commission, be ‘active and effective,’ because local officers are too dependent on their immediate employers to be thoroughly efficient. “In advocating protection let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean centralisation or the removal of that proper control which every local authority should maintain over its own officers. I would maintain intact the great principle of local government, which has been the bulwark of our social and political freedom. But local government may degenerate, and in small towns deteriorate into littleness: local affairs are too frequently avoided by those who are most fitted by intelligence and social standing to take part therein. I would simply control in the most constitutional manner the short-comings or excesses of local government as is already done in various other departments. I would require that local officers should be properly qualified and adequately remunerated; that in the honest discharge of their duties and during good behaviour they should be protected from the effects of ignorance, narrow prejudices, and interested clamour, and that they should have an appeal to a disinterested and judicial body, superior to local feeling. The demand is reasonable--I ask no more. . . . .” To these admirable remarks by Mr. Angell on the present position of the town surveyor I can add but little. I believe that the sole reason which is given why Government protection is not granted to the surveyor is the argument used by those in authority, that if a surveyor disagrees with the corporation he serves, it is considered better that he should resign his appointment rather than be protected by the Local Government Board or other central office; but if this argument is sound, why does it not also apply in a similar manner to the medical officer of health or the inspector of nuisances? The real fact no doubt is, that in framing the Public Health Act of 1875, medical men were consulted and not engineers, and this is very apparent in many of the clauses, which will be fully considered in their proper places in this book.