To this singular state of things the nation had long been indifferent.  During the Middle Ages the inhavitants often had no desire either to go to Parliament themselves or to send others.  The expense of the journey was great, the compensation was small, and unless some important matter of special interest to the people was at stake, they preferred to stay at home.  On this account it was often almost as difficult for the sheriff to get a distant county member up to the House of Commons in London as it would have been to carry him there a prisoner to be tried for his life.

Now, however, everything was changed; the rise of political parties (S479), the constant and heavy taxation, the jealousy of the increase of royal authority, the influence and honor of the position of a Parliamentary representative, all conspired to make men eager to obtain their full share in the management of the government.

This new interest had begun as far back as the civil wars of the seventeenth century, and when Cromwell came to power he effected many much-needed reforms.  But after the restoration of the Stuarts (S467), the Protector’s wise measures were repealed or neglected.  Then the old order, or rather disorder, again asserted itself, and in many cases matters became worse than ever.

579.  “Rotten Boroughs.”

For instance, the borough or city of Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, which had once been an important place, had, at an early period, gradually declined through the growth of New Sarum, or Salisbury, near by. (See map, p.436.) In the sixteenth century the parent city had so completely decayed that not a single habitation was left on the desolate hilltop where the caste and cathedral once stood.  At the foot of the hill was an old tree.  The owner of that tree and of the field where it grew sent (1830) two members to Parliament,—­that action represented what had been regularly going on for something like three hundred years!

In Bath, on the other hand, none of the citizens, out of a large population, might vote except the mayor, alderman, and common council.  These places now got the significant name of “rotten boroughs” from the fact that whether large or small there was no longer any sound political life existing in them.  Many towns were so completely in the hands of the squire or some other local “political boss” that, on one occasion when a successful candidate for Parliament thanked the voters for what they had done, a man replied that he need not take the trouble to thank them; for, said he, “if the squire had zent his great dog we should have chosen him all one as if it were you, zur."[1]

[1] See Hindon, in Murray’s “Wiltshire.”

580.  The Great Reform Bill.