Page:The English Peasant.djvu/51

 a more convenient route, and secured the best places to see the show. The Ordinary and the Hangman dispatch their duties with small ceremony and equal unconcern, and very soon half a dozen human bodies are dangling in the air.

What the people thought of these sights, no one has cared to tell us. We may be certain, however, of one thing, their whole sympathy went with the sufferers and not with the law.

" ubique jacet," said Queen Elizabeth as she made a progress through the kingdom, and found herself everywhere surrounded by vast flocks of poor people. In the midst of individual wealth and national greatness the complaint was ever rising, "There is no country with so many poor as England." The reason was simple: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." Henry and Elizabeth so merged the Church and State one into the other that those who dared to say nay became guilty of a sort of treason, and were thrown into prison, whipped, pilloried, mutilated, or sent to the gallows.

In thus asserting the nation to be a Church of Christ, Parliament proclaimed the English people a Society of Brothers, and on the ground of this very brotherhood commenced their first essay in making provision for the wants of the impotent poor. But, as we have seen, everything had combined to stir up the spirit of selfishness in England, so that, from the court to the city, from the baronial hall to the counting-house, there never was a time in which individual greed had more thoroughly taken possession of a nation. Gentle asking of every man and woman what in their charity they would be contented to give weekly towards the relief of their poor brethren in Christ; charitable ways and means of persuading obstinate persons and parishes to take their share in this duty, had to be given up, and the recalcitrants handed over to the Justices of the Peace, who were to tax them in a weekly sum, and commit them to prison until it was paid.