I now pass to the subject-matter of the Acts of Parliament; and I again turn to Mr. Spalding’s book. He has made a most interesting analysis of the statutes up to the year 1890, from which it appears that Parliament had been unable to legislate by Acts applying over the whole of the United Kingdom whenever it had had to deal with the administration of justice and the laws relating to any of the following subjects: the tenure and occupation of land; the holding, transfer, and devolution of property (including land); the Church; the poor; local government, rural and urban; roads, railways, and canals; and education.(160) These are the subjects, that is to say, on which Parliament had been obliged to pass separate laws for the different parts of the United Kingdom, and the study of this centrifugal tendency seemed to me so important that I have continued (on the next page) the analysis for the following twenty years. The first impression derived from this table is that the division between the subjects on which the legislation covers the whole of the United Kingdom, and those on which it has a narrower application, is much the same as during the earlier period. Parliament continues to legislate separately for the “States” in the matters in which it has been its practice so to do, and this in itself is a very significant consideration in view of the strong contrary inducement resulting from the growing congestion of Parliamentary business. Thus, taking the last three headings on the list, we see that in regard to Education, the Poor, and the Church, all the legislation during the twenty years was of a “State” character, while the very numerous Acts relating to Local Administration were in almost every instance equally limited in their application. When we pass to Law and Justice, and to Land and Agriculture, we find that the “State” predominance is not quite so marked, but even so, there were three times as many “State” as “United Kingdom” laws, and we conclude that, though the pressure of Parliamentary business is against it, “State” legislation continues to hold the field over a wide and varied range of legislative activity. Public General Acts.—United Kingdom.(161)