a
Government of reformers, and Lord Melbourne found himself compelled to
go on with the work of reform. Nothing could be less in keeping with
his habits and the inclinations of his easy-going nature. It used to
be said of him that whenever he was urged to set about any work of the
kind his instinctive impulse always was to meet the suggestion with the
question: "Why can't you let it alone?" Now, however, he had in his
Cabinet some men, like Lord John Russell, whose earnestness in the
cause of Reform was genuine and unconquerable; and if Lord Melbourne
was too indolent to press forward reforms on his own account, he was
also too indolent to resist such a pressure when put on him by others.

[Sidenote: 1835--Foundation of municipal bodies]

There was one great pressing and obvious reform which remained to be
accomplished and ought naturally to follow on the reorganization of the
Parliamentary system. That was the reorganization of the municipal
system. The municipal work of the country, the management of all the
various and complicated relations which concerned the local affairs of
the whole community, had become a mere chaos of anomalies,
anachronisms, and, in too many instances, of reckless mismanagement and
downright corruption. If the sort of so-called representation which
prevailed in the Parliamentary constituencies was, up to 1832, an
absurdity and a fraud, it was not perhaps on the whole quite so absurd
or altogether so fraudulent as that which set itself up for a
representative system in the arrangements of the municipal
corporations. As in the case of the {255} Parliamentary system, so in
the case of the municipal system, the organization had begun with an
intelligible principle to guide it; but, during the lapse of years and
even of centuries, the original purpose had been swamped by the gradual
and always increasing growth of confusion and corruption. The
municipal arrangements of England had begun as a practical protest
against the feudal system. While the feudal laws or customs still
prevailed, the greater proportion of the working-classes were really
little better than serfs at the absolute control of their feudal lords
and masters. The comparatively small proportion of men who formed the
trading class of the community found themselves compelled to devise
some kind of arrangement for the security of themselves, their traffic,
and their property against the dominion of the ruling class. It was
p