are too often left to work their will unchecked.  Are such people fit for political power?  Ask the wretched rich man who indirectly buys the seat, and hear his record of dull misery if he is inclined to be confidential.  He does not like to leave Parliament, and yet he knows he is merely a mark for the licensed pickpocket; he is not regarded as a politician—­he is a donor of sundry subscriptions, and nothing more.  The men in manufacturing centres will return a poor politician and pay his expenses; but the people in some quiet towns have about as much sentiment or loyalty as they have knowledge; and they treat their member of Parliament as a gentleman whose function it is to be bled, and bled copiously.  A sorry sight it is!

One very remarkable thing in these homes of quietness is the marvellous power possessed by drink-sellers.  These gentry form the main links in a very tough chain, and they hang together with touching fidelity; their houses are turned into scandal-shops, and they prosper so long as they are ready to cringe with due self-abasement before the magistrates.  No refined gentleman who keeps himself to his own class and refrains from meddling with politics could ever by any chance imagine the airs of broad-blown impudence which are sometimes assumed by ignorant and stupid boors who have been endowed with a license; and assuredly no one would guess the extent of their political power unless he had something to do with election business.  The landlord of fiction hardly exists in the quiet towns; there is seldom a smiling, suave, and fawning Boniface to be seen; the influential drink-seller is often an insolent familiar harpy who will speak of his own member of Parliament as “Old Tom,” and who airily ventures to call gentlemen by their surnames.  The man is probably so benighted in mind that he knows nothing positive about the world he lives in; his manners are hideous, his familiarity is loathsome, his assumptions of manly independence are almost comic in their impudence; but he has his uses, and he can influence votes of several descriptions.  Thus he asserts himself in detestable fashion; and people who should know better submit to him.  One electioneering campaign in a quiet town would give a salutary lesson to any politician who resolutely set himself to penetrate into the secret life of the society whose suffrages he sought; he would learn why it is that the agents of all the factions treat the drink-seller with deference.

So the queer existence of the tranquil place moves on; petty scandal, petty thieving, petty jobbery, petty jealousy employ the energies of the beings who inhabit the “good old town”—­the borough is always good and old—­and a man with a soul who really tried to dwell in the moral atmosphere of the community would infallibly be asphyxiated.  Nowhere are appearances so deceptive; nowhere do the glamour of antiquity and the beauty of natural scenery draw the attention away from so vile a centre.