That the water supply should be under the control and management of the municipality had long been advocated, but though hundreds of County and Municipal Authorities in Great Britain--many of them not the hundredth part of the size of London--had a Municipal Water Supply, that great boon was denied to London. The reform was vigorously pressed by the central representative body of London--the London County Council--and after several Royal Commissions of Inquiry, Parliament dealt with the subject in 1902. But the manner of dealing with it was unfortunate and retrograde. A new public Board--the Metropolitan Water Board--was established for the purpose of acquiring, by purchase, for the inhabitants of London, and of certain areas outside London, the undertakings of the eight Metropolitan Water Companies, and for managing and carrying on the supply of water. The great bulk of the purchase money was to be provided by the ratepayers of London, and the great bulk of the debt to be a charge on the rateable property of London. The Board was to consist of 66 members, 14 of whom were to be nominated by the London County Council, 31 by the Metropolitan Borough Councils and the City Corporation, and the remaining 21 by the authorities of localities outside London hitherto supplied by the Companies. The Board, therefore, was not a representative body directly elected by the ratepayers or electors of London, but was constructed, on the discredited precedent of the Metropolitan Board of Works, of delegated instead of elected members; and though the people of London were emancipated from the control of trading Water Companies, they got in their place a body over which they can exercise no direct, and therefore very little actual, control. The new Board was constituted in the spring of 1903, and took over the undertakings of the Water Companies on the 24th of June, 1904, at the cost to the ratepayers of London of not much less than £40,000,000, a sum immensely higher than that at which they could have been acquired many years before. And inasmuch as the Board can call upon the ratepayers of London to make good any deficiency of income resulting from their management, the unsatisfactory result is the establishment in London of a new indirectly-elected public body vested with enormous financial powers affecting the interests of the ratepayers of London, and yet but little responsible to public control. The third of the three important Acts, the Education London Act, was passed in 1903, and carried in its bosom possibilities of the most far-reaching benefits to the health and physical welfare of future generations. By this Act the London School Board was abolished, and its duties transferred to the London County Council, which was constituted the Education Authority for London.