claims an interest in the condition of the people which overrides personal privileges. In our own time, even with the whole world open for destitution to escape into comfort, a poor rate to the extent, if necessary, even of temporary confiscation,[1] is levied upon the land, if those who are born upon it cannot otherwise be saved from starvation. At a time when there was no organized system of relief, it was absolutely necessary to do something, though what should be done was more difficult to say. Sir William Paget touched the very heart of the matter when he said that there was no religion in England. 'Society in a realm,' he wrote to the Protector, 'doth consist and is maintained by means of religion and law, and these two or one wanting, farewell all just society, government, justice. I fear at home is neither. The use of the old religion is forbidden, the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm.'[2] When religion revived, the country righted of itself. The ancient healthy tone of English custom returned. The people and the Crown united to replace the old ways, so far as it was good that they should be replaced. The
- ↑ In many parts of Ireland, during the great famine, the poor-rate was twenty shillings in the pound.
- ↑ Paget to Somerset: MS. Domestic, Edward VI. State Paper Office.
hose.'—MS. Domestic, Mary, State Paper Office.
In a variety of inventories of furniture in gentlemen's country houses in the reign of Mary, I find the hangings of beds—not of state beds, but beds for common use—to have been of blue or crimson velvet; the window-curtains of satin, and, in fact, everything except the washing apparatus, of which there is little or no mention, to have been similarly gorgeous.—MS. Ibid.
