to the subject, that the remarkable shaking of the
dry bones during the Reform Bill period, which culminated in the great
measure of 1832, was merely a matter of politics--that John Bull was
only buying a new broom to sweep away here and there an Old Sarum, and
dust the benches of St. Stephen's for new company and--_voila tout_!
the nation was reformed at a stroke! Yet that was not all by any
means. In most of the rural districts of England there were parishes,
not here and there, but parishes by shoals, presenting a state of
things more rotten and more demoralizing than anything that the annals
of Borough-mongering could furnish.

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Then the great bulk of the poor people in our villages held to the
sentiment expressed in the lines--

Come let us drink, sing, and be merry,
For the parish is bound to maintain us!

When the ratepayers began to assert themselves the pauper element broke
out in open riot and incendiarism. Then came severe penal measures,
Poor-law commissions, and an awakening of the national conscience to
the fact that there was something besides political Old Sarums to
reform if the salt in John Bull's family cupboard was not to entirely
lose its savour. A state of things was disclosed in many villages in
rural England at which the more thoughtful stood aghast, for under the
sacred name of charity, laziness and immorality, unblushing and
impudent, were found to be feeding the stream of pauperism and eating
out the vitals of our country life.

At the root of the domestic and social ruin which the old Poor-law was
silently but surely spreading through our villages, lay the two
principal factors of labour and public morals--the farmers paying low
wages and the parish making up the difference according to the number
of a man's family, and the lax way in which bastardy was dealt with by
the parish.

As to Royston, in 1831, when the Commissioners were appointed to
inquire into the laws affecting the relief of the poor, there were
fifty agricultural labourers in the town; wages nine or ten shillings a
week without beer; the magistrates required an allowance to be made
from the rates to make up earnings, according to the number in family,
but, it is added, that "this system is objected to by this parish."

"The desire to build the largest number of cottages upon the smallest
space and with no ground attached was strongly condemned," but the seed
had been sown and the harvest is still with us