Wisdom in administration may do much to keep awake the independent self-supporting instinct even in face of such provision as this, apparently free to all worthy persons. The standard of worthiness may be kept strictly enforced. Those able to continue at work may be encouraged to do so, as, for instance by a method explained to me by one administrator, who said that in cases where persons capable of work applied and were able to establish a claim in all other respects, their capacity for partial self-support was insisted on, and if a grant was made, it was often quite small, comparable with a dollar a month, for example. Whatever else may be said of it, the Danish plan of providing for the aged who have, through no fault of their own, fallen on bad times, possesses too much of interest to permit us to dismiss it from consideration as a case of laxity of poor-law relief under another name. A. W. FLUX. Manchester, England. QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED BY APPLICANTS FOR OLD AGE Relief, and ATTESTED BY THEM. [NOTE.-A Somewhat different set of questions is used in the case of widows and divorced or separated women.] 1. Has the applicant been constantly resident in this country, without intermission, for the last ten years; if so, where and for how long in each place? 2. Has the applicant, in the course of the last ten years, received any poorrelief for himself or for his wife, or for legitimate or illegitimate, adopted or step-children; if so, of what has it consisted, when was it received and from what commune ? 3. Has the applicant, in the course of the last ten years, been found guilty of vagrancy or begging? 4. Has the applicant ever been condemned to punishment for crime; if so, when and how did it occur? 5, In what commune does the applicant consider himself to be settled? [As a rule that commune in which he has last resided for five years without intermission and without receiving poor-relief, or, in case there has not been such a residence, his place of birth.] 6. The number of his family and the ages of its members? 7. Is the applicant living alone, or with his family or others, and in the latter case, with whom? 8. (a) What means of support has the applicant or the members of his household? (6) The approximate amount of the total income of the applicant and his household in the last year? (c) How much of this income was derived from pension, allowances, dividends, legacies, real property, assistance (i. e. of children or friends), or the like income, each item separately stated as far as possible? 9. Has the applicant any prospect of assistance from relatives or others, or has he reason to expect to succeed to any inheritance? 10. The applicant's means? [Money, real property, allowances, moveables, debts owing, etc., with statement of approximate value.] II. The applicant's debts? 12. How much did the applicant pay in house-rent in the last year? 13. The cause of the applicant's need, and in this connection, statements of his own and his wife's health and working power, etc.? 14. How much does the applicant require, and of what does he wish it to consist (i. e. if in kind)? 15. Any further remarks which the applicant thinks proper to make. The answers to these questions with papers establishing the age, identity, etc., of the applicant constitute the form of application, to which is appended a declaration of the truth of the statements signed by the applicant, and a signed declaration by two others that, from their personal knowledge, the need of the applicant is not due to extravagance, etc., in fact to his own fault. NOTES. Rotten Boroughs of Old and New England. In many of its aspects the movement for the reform of the representative system in Connecticut is strikingly similar to that for Parliamentary reform which dragged along in England through three centuries, from the time of Queen Elizabeth until the Reform Acts of 1884 and 1885. In England, as in Connecticut, there were no inequalities when the representative system first came into being. The inequalities in England were developed first by the successful efforts of the aristocracy to possess themselves of Parliamentary boroughs, and later on by the growth of population. As in Connecticut during the last forty years, the development of these inequalities in representation was hastened by the great developments in industry. This was especially so between the Revolution of 1688 and the end of the eighteenth century, which witnessed the beginning of the factory era and the growth of great industrial centers, such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. The creation of Parliamentary boroughs in England, which first tended to inequalities, came to an end before the Commonwealth. Only one borough was given representation between the Restoration and 1832; and when the House of Commons was reformed in 1832, except for the merging of two or three corrupt boroughs. into county areas, and the introduction of Members from Scotland and Ireland at the Unions, the representative system stood as it did when the Stuart dynasty came to an end. In its early nineteenth century beginnings, the representative system in Connecticut was not unlike the English representative system. When the English system was established in the thirteenth century, it was the fault of a borough if it were not represented by two Members. In the early days of the House of Commons and until the fifteenth century, when wages began to disappear and seats in Parliament became in demand, the grievance of towns was not that they were unrepresented, but that they were compelled to bear the burden of the charges attending representation. The constitution which the reformers of Connecticut seek to amend is that of 1818. When this constitution was adopted, there do not seem to have been any inequalities in the representation. All the Connecticut towns were then in the position of the English J boroughs during the first two centuries of the House of Commons. They were all small, as towns go nowadays, and all of them were represented. As in England during the first centuries of the House of Commons, Members of the Legislature had to be residents of the towns they represented, and they were paid wages. The only difference between the two systems as regards wages was that the English towns had to pay them from local taxes, while in Connecticut Members were and are still paid from the State Treasury. In Connecticut representation in the Legislature has always meant one or two offices more for a town, and offices, moreover, the salaries of which do not come out of the town funds. There would have been few of the anachronisms and inequalities which marked the English system in the two centuries preceding the great Reform of 1832, had wages in England been paid from national instead of local funds. At the time the system of representation which had grown up in Connecticut in the eighteenth century was stereotyped by the Constitution of 1818, there was no marked disparity between the one hundred and twenty towns then sending representatives to the Legislature. There was not much call for a redistribution measure in 1818, when the two largest cities in the State had each populations of less than seven thousand. Two members each for New Haven and Hartford formed a fair representation; for many of the smaller towns had then only one member. For thirty years after the adoption of the Constitution of 1818, the larger towns had still no very serious grievance. They were growing in population, but not at anything like the rate of the last thirty years. With the development of manufacturing, the cities have grown enormously; while these same causes, together with the opening out of the West, have tended to the partial depopulation of farming towns, and have had the effect of making most of them at least stationary in population. Up to the Federal Census of 1890, these changes had gone on to such an extent as to make the inequalities of representation glaringly obvious, quite as obvious as were many of the inequalities in the English Parliamentary system up to the Reform of 1832. Since 1890, the movement to the cities and to the manufacturing towns has been proceeding at an accelerated pace, with the result that to-day New Haven has a population of nearly 100,000, Hartford 75,000, and Bridgeport nearly 60,000. Nothing has occurred since 1890 to stay the decline of the farming towns. The net result of these movements of population, combined with the rigidity of the representative system, is that to-day six or seven large cities, containing half of the population of the State, have practically no weight in the Legislature. It is true that each large city has still two members; but when it comes to a vote, New Haven, Hartford and Bridgeport are hardly appreciably better off than were Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham in the House of Commons before 1832. The representation of the Connecticut cities. secures them little more than the privileges of the floor; and although Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham did not directly enjoy this privilege in the Unreformed Parliament, indirectly they did so, because the forty shilling free-holders of Manchester voted for Members for the County of Lancaster, and Manchester had direct claims upon these Members at Westminster. In the same way Leeds had claims on the Yorkshire Members; while Birmingham. had equal claims on the representatives of the County of Warwick. The cities of Connecticut are quite as unfairly treated in the matter of representation in the Lower House as were Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham under the Unreformed English system. If these English cities could bring their county Members round to their point of view, the votes of these county Members in a division in the House were liable to be neutralized by votes given by each of the two Members from such miserable apologies for Parliamentary boroughs as Old Sarum, Gatton or Dunwich. At Old Sarum, all through the eighteenth century, there were no resident electors. There were no houses, and at election times a tent had to be pitched on the grass-grown site of the long vanished borough to shelter the returning officer. At Gatton there were six houses and one voter; while at Dunwich, so much of the borough had been washed away by the German Ocean that had Parliamentary Reform been much longer delayed, the electors might have been obliged to convene in a boat when the sheriff's precept summoned them to exercise the Parliamentary franchise. The Unions, the East Granbys, the Scotlands, and the other stationary or decaying towns of rural Connecticut have not reached the level of the Sarums, the Gattons and the Grampounds of the eighteenth century House of Commons. But the inequalities between the Connecticut cities and these small towns are as illogical and as unfair as those of the old system in England, and it is easy to understand how the English eighteenth century term "rotten boroughs" has come to be applied in Connecticut. These Con |