e borough are divided into
131 polling districts.

~Polytechnic.~--This was one of the many local literary, scientific, and
educational institutions which have been replaced by our Midland
Institute, Free Libraries, &c. It was founded in April, and opened in
October, 1843, and at the close of its first year there were the names
of very nearly 500 members on the books, the rates of subscription being
6s. per quarter for participation in all the benefits of the
institution, including the lectures, library, classes, baths, &c. With
the "People's Instruction Society," the "Athenic Institute," the "Carr's
Lane Brotherly Society" (said to have been the first Mechanics'
Institution in Britain), the Polytechnic, in its day, did good work.

~Poor Law and Poor Rates.~--Local history does not throw much light
upon the system adopted by our early progenitors in their dealings with
the poor, but if the merciless laws were strictly carried out, the
wandering beggars, at all events must have had hard lives of it. By an
act passed in the reign of Henry VIII., it was ordered that vagrants
should be taken to a market town, or other convenient place and there to
be tied to the tail of a cart, naked, and beaten with whips until the
body should be bloody by reason of the punishment. Queen Elizabeth so
far mitigated the punishment that the unfortunates were only to be
stripped from the waist upwards to receive their whipping, men and
women, maids and mothers, suffering alike in the open street or
market-place, the practice being, after so using them, to conduct them
to the boundary of the parish and pass them on to the next place for
another dose, and it was not until 1791 that flogging of women was
forbidden. The resident or native poor were possibly treated a little
better, though they were made to work for their bread in every possible
case. By the new Poor Act of 1783, which authorised the erection of a
Workhouse, it was also provided that the "Guardians of the Poor" should
form a Board consisting of 106 members, and the election of the first
Board (July 15th, 1783), seems to have been almost as exciting as a
modern election. In one sense of the word they were guardians indeed,
for they seem to have tried their inventive faculties in all ways to
find work for the inmates of the House, even to hiring them out, or
setting them to make worsted and thread. The Guardians would also seem
to have long had great freedom allowed them in the spen