end others. The
expense of the journey was great, the compensation was small, and
unless some important matter of special interest to the people was at
stake, they preferred to stay at home. On this account it was often
almost as difficult for the sheriff to get a distant county member up
to the House of Commons in London as it would have been to carry him
there a prisoner to be tried for his life.

Now, however, everything was changed; the rise of political parties
(S479), the constant and heavy taxation, the jealousy of the increase
of royal authority, the influence and honor of the position of a
Parliamentary representative, all conspired to make men eager to
obtain their full share in the management of the government.

This new interest had begun as far back as the civil wars of the
seventeenth century, and when Cromwell came to power he effected many
much-needed reforms. But after the restoration of the Stuarts (S467),
the Protector's wise measures were repealed or neglected. Then the
old order, or rather disorder, again asserted itself, and in many
cases matters became worse than ever.

579. "Rotten Boroughs."

For instance, the borough or city of Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, which
had once been an important place, had, at an early period, gradually
declined through the growth of New Sarum, or Salisbury, near by. (See
map, p.436.) In the sixteenth century the parent city had so
completely decayed that not a single habitation was left on the
desolate hilltop where the caste and cathedral once stood. At the
foot of the hill was an old tree. The owner of that tree and of the
field where it grew sent (1830) two members to Parliament,--that
action represented what had been regularly going on for something like
three hundred years!

In Bath, on the other hand, none of the citizens, out of a large
population, might vote except the mayor, alderman, and common
council. These places now got the significant name of "rotten
boroughs" from the fact that whether large or small there was no
longer any sound political life existing in them. Many towns were so
completely in the hands of the squire or some other local "political
boss" that, on one occasion when a successful candidate for Parliament
thanked the voters for what they had done, a man replied that he need
not take the trouble to thank them; for, said he, "if the squire had
zent his great dog we should have chosen him all one as if it were
you, zur."[1]

[1