Yet here, again, the existing records
are surprisingly free from any evidence tending to support such an
assumption, England was not governed by the Home Secretary in those
days. Every parish was a living political unit with its own police
and its own local government. However desirable it may appear to some
to bring back such a state of things, the question nevertheless
remains how far it is ever possible to revivify an organization which
has long since died a natural death. That, in the fourteenth century,
the country districts governed themselves there can be no doubt at
all; with what results, as far as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number is concerned, this is not the time or the place to
inquire or to decide. Yet I cannot withhold my conviction that, if
any such gigantic calamity were to fall upon our people now as fell
upon them when the Black Death swept over the face of the land five
centuries ago--a calamity so sweeping, so overwhelming--its
consequences upon the whole social fabric would be incomparably more
disastrous than it was in times when centralization was almost
unknown and practically impossible. Be it as it may, since the days
when the Roman Senate passed a vote of confidence in a beaten general
because he had not despaired of the republic, I know nothing in
history that impresses a student more profoundly with a sense of the
magnificent self-possession, self-control, and self-respect of a
suffering nation, under circumstances of unexampled agony and horror,
than the simple prosaic annals which remain to us of the great plague
year in England.
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