Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/20

8 Whether it be contended that our rulers were enlightened or Struck blind when they projected such changes—the changes "were made: every portion of those two systems remains for our children, a law reversed or a barrier broken down.

Where are the grosser corruptions of our Parliamentary representation? Swept away one morning in a storm of cheers. Yet it is not so long since Lord John Russell attempted to sow the first fragile seed of the Reform Bill, by proposing that rotten boroughs should be purchased by the nation; their owners to receive compensation from an indebted country, for the extinguished right of selling shares in what is supposed to be the aggregate Voice of the People. It is not so long since the same Minister of Liberty urged the claim of those great capitals of mercantile interest, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, to be represented in the lower house, and urged that claim in vain: since he complained of national apathy on the subject which afterwards shook England to its centre; and beheld that great measure of Reform which, like the burden of Sisyphus, he had heaved up so often only to see it roll back to its former position allowed at length to rest in the English Senate by favour of a majority of.

These are changes, affecting political rights; struggled for by political men; opposed or upheld by the whole mass of the people: but there are others, affecting sections of the community, in which an equal or even greater amount of alteration, has been effected, and in which the value and power of individual effort is more distinctly visible. Our Schools, our Prisons, and our Mad-houses, are all under Government supervision. Their occupants form classes set apart—by helplessness of age, by error of conduct, and by the visitation of God—from those that have free control of their destiny; and we point with pride to the model regularity of system and of architecture which we have recently introduced for the better management of their interests. How was it before the change could be effected? How was it, first, with the most miserable of those classses [sic], the