Dudley returns one member to Parliament; whose politics must, it is supposed, be those of the holder of the Ward estate.

Returning from Dudley through Walsall to Bescot Bridge, the rail pursues its course through a mining country to Bilston and Wolverhampton.  On the road we pass in sight of the Birmingham canal, one of the finest works of the kind in the kingdom.  An enormous sum was spent in improving the navigation, in order to prove that any railway was unnecessary.  The proprietors, under the influence of their officials, a snug family party, shut their eyes and spent their money in opposing the inevitable progress of locomotive power to the last possible moment.  Even when the first London and Birmingham railway was nearly open, a scheme for a new canal was industriously hawked round the county; and, although there were not enough subscribers found to execute the work, a small percentage was sufficient to furnish a surveyor’s new house very handsomely.  Still, there is no probability of the canal ever ceasing to be an important aid to the coal trade in heavy freights.

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Wednesbury, {130} pronounced Wedgebury, and spelt Wednesberie in Domesday Book, stands in the very heart of the coal and iron district, and is as like Tipton, Darlaston, Bilston, and other towns where the inhabitants are similarly employed, as one sweep is like another.  Birmingham factors depend largely on Wedgebury for various kinds of ironwork and “heavy steel toys.”  The coal pits in the neighbourhood are of great value, and there is no better place in the kingdom to buy a thoroughbred bull dog that will “kill or die on it,” but never turn tail.  The name is supposed to incorporate that of the Saxon god Woden, whose worship consisted in getting drunk and fighting, and, to this day, that is the only kind of relaxation in which many of the inhabitants ever indulge.  The church stands upon a hill, where Ethelfleda, Lady of Mercia, built a castle to resist the Danes, A.D. 914, about the time that she erected similar bulwarks at Tamworth and other towns in the Midland counties, but there are no antiquities worth the trouble of visiting.

Parties who take an interest in the progress of education in this kingdom among those classes where it is most needed, that is to say, masses of miners and mechanics residing in districts from which all the higher and most of the middle classes have removed; where the clergy are few, hard worked, and ill paid; where the virtues of a thinly peopled agricultural district have been exchanged for the vices, without the refinements, of a crowded town population, should traverse this part of Staffordshire on foot.  They will own that, in spite of the praiseworthy labours of both Church and Dissent,—­in spite of the progress of Temperance Societies and Savings’ Banks,—­a crowd of children are daily growing up in a state of ignorance, dirt, and degradation fearful to contemplate.