amentary reform, as represented by
the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social
reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth
that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done
by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised
workhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the
black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our
literature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and
Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary
indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the
logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress
finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The
Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and
have everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to give
of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealth
were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever been
made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most
capricious operations of the _lettres de cachet_ there still hovered
some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for
something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who
cannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most
decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; for
no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell.

The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the
culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the
earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular
effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and
the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became
a problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, even
when the question of slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question
of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and
the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare
ground--even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a
veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actually
punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground
that he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, how