The new Poor Law, 1834.‘New Poor Law’ (1834), which refused to give food or money to the idle and improvident unless they would come into the ‘Workhouse’; and this law made workhouse life sufficiently unpleasant, so that lots of idle loafers, who had hitherto ‘lived on the rates’, preferred to earn their own living. Municipal reform, 1885.The same Whig Government in 1835 reformed the town councils of our cities and boroughs in such a way that every householder now gets a vote for the election of his town council. County Councils, 1889.In 1889 a Conservative Government extended this plan to the country districts also, and in each shire a ‘county council’ is now elected, which manages all local business such as the keeping up of roads, bridges, lunatic asylums, and the police. It was Sir Robert Peel who created the present magnificent force of policemen, and its members are still sometimes, in sport, called after him ‘bobbies’ and ‘peelers.’
National Education, 1870.Perhaps the most important of all reforms of the nineteenth century was the introduction in 1870 for all classes of the people of a system of schools, supported by the State and paid for by a rate on each district. Every one is now compelled to attend some kind of school, and a man may be sent to prison if he refuses to send his children to school. When I was a boy it was quite common to meet people who could neither read nor write; now it is the rarest thing in the world.
The food question.There was one burning question all through the first thirty years of this period, of which I have yet told you nothing; and it was the most serious of all—the question of food. Great Britain and Ireland could no longer grow enough corn to feed their great and rapidly increasing populations. For the two-and-twenty years which ended in 1815, Governments had been too busy