and the power to arrange
their own affairs. They will have something to say as to the
administration of the poor-law, over which at present they do not
possess the slightest control, and they are not at all unlikely to
set up a species of self-government in every separate village. I
think, in short, that the parish may become the unit in the future
to the disintegration of the artificial divisions drawn to
facilitate the poor-law. Such divisions, wherein many parishes of
the most diverse description and far apart are thrown together
anyhow as the gardener pitches weeds into his basket, have done
serious harm in the past. They have injured the sense of personal
responsibility, they have created a bureaucracy absolutely without
feeling, and they have tended to shift great questions out of
sight. The shifting of things out of sight--round the corner--is a
vile method of dealing with them. Send your wretched poor miles
away into a sort of alien workhouse, and then congratulate
yourself that you have tided over the difficulty! But the
difficulty has not been got over.

A man who can vote, and who is told--as he certainly will be
told--that he bears a part in directing the great affairs of his
nation, will ask himself why he should not be capable of managing
the little affairs of his own neighbourhood. When he has asked
himself this question, it will be the first step towards the
downfall of the inhuman poor-law. He will go further and say, 'Why
should I not settle these things at home? Why should I not walk up
to the village from my house in the country lane, and there and then
arrange the business which concerns me? Why should I any longer
permit it to be done over my head and without my consent by a body
of persons in whom I have no confidence, for they do not represent
me--they represent property?'

In his own village the voter will observe the school--his own
village then is worthy to possess its own school; possibly he may
even remotely have some trifling share in the control of the school
if there is a board. If that great interest, the children of the
parish, can be administered at home, why not the other and much less
important interests? Here may be traced a series of reflections, and
a succession of steps by which ultimately the whole system of boards
of guardians with their attendant powers, as the rural sanitary
authority and so forth, may ultimately be swept away. Government
will come again to the village.