of no use for us to say to a man like that,
let us alone,

      "Let us alone, what pleasure can we have
       To war with evil? Is there any peace
       In ever climbing up the climbing wave?"

We are all put, mentally, upon that sort of
treadmill. Mr. Zinzib is a very hot man, and
he is hot in our mouths too; we abuse him
thoroughly. It is of no use to go to church
and pray for peace when there is an agitator
in the parish; a man who spends his mornings
in discovering abuses, and his afternoons in
worrying about them, and his evenings in
writing to everybody, and fetching down about
our ears Home Secretaries, boards, inspectors,
newspapers of all sorts; a man who writes
with equal readiness long letters to the
Edinburgh Review, the London Times, the Bengal
Hurkaru, or the Land's End Weekly
Telegraph and Standard: all designed to call attention
from every corner of the Empire, to the
abuses that exist at Cess-cum-Poolton. Why
will he not let us alone? We nearly had him on
the hip, the other day, when a tenant of his in
the town carried his shop-front forward to the
railing. Squire Fitz-Canute, who is very wroth
with Zinzib for having brought the Public
Health Act down upon us, ordered his solicitor
to write and tell the agitator's tenant that he
must not proceed with his shop, but must
pull it down at once as an illegal
projection. The radical thereupon, in his usual
unneighbourly way, took advantage of the
fact that other tradesmen who were not his
tenants had been allowed to carry their shops
forward, and that a new market-house had
been built which projected ten feet over the
Queen's highway. He told his tenant to go
on. If they made him pull his shop down,
(he said) he would have down all the other
shops in like position, and would demolish
the new market-house into the bargain.
What can be done with a man who goes
to work upon this revolutionary principle,
and calls it paying twenty shillings in the
pound?

The agitator Zinzib having made a stir and
obtained even the co-operation of the vicar,
who considers him to be a Rad of hot but
wholesome qualities, got up a petition signed
by more than the required tenth of the
inhabitants, praying for the visit of an
inspector, with a view to the establishment
of the provisions of the Public Health Act in
the parish of Cess-cum-Poolton. The
inspector came among us, and in a report dated
the 15th of November, 1851, recommended
that the Public Health Act should be applied
to all parts of Cess-cum-Poolton included
within a certain line of boundary. The
boundaries recommended not being those of the
whole parish, a second inquiry was made
necessary by the requisition of the Act of
Parliament. It was also made advisable by
the fact that we Cess-cum-Pooltonians
bestirred ourselves, and petitioned against the
introduction of the Act, two hundred and
fifty strong, with the Squire at the head of
us. Cottagers who had been told that the
Act would cost them each from eighteen to
forty shillings a year; and tradesmen well
informed—as for example, one who "was
informed and believed" that the Act would
cost him for his own house fifteen pounds a
year for thirty years—signed a petition, stating
that the signatures in favour of sanitary
interference were the result of misapprehension
and misrepresentation; and that the
introduction of the Health Act was, in the case of
Cess-cum-Poolton, not at all necessary. A
new inspector being sent down, first inquired
into the accusation made very bitterly against
our arch agitator, that he had induced people
by untruths to sign the first petition. Our
case failed, and the original application was
substantiated, very much to our disgust. We
had, however, pounded our Zinzib well in a
meeting at the great room in the Fitz-Canute
Arms, and we had all the respectability on
our side.

The Squire and his solicitor, and ex-solicitor,
were the leaders of the let-alone party. Sanitary
reform was not required in Cess-cum-
Poolton. We fought, as every cock should
fight on his own dunghill, fiercely. Our
skeleton friend Death was among us, and
I dare say might have been seen
sometimes by any one with the right sort of eyes,
abroad of nights with a bag of babies thrown
over his shoulder, and sticking up with his
own bony fingers such a placard as this, on
a dead wall—"Rate-payers of Cess-cum-
Poolton, rally round your Vested Interests.
Health is enormously expensive. Introduce
the Public Health Act, and you will be
pauperised. Be filthy and be fat. Cesspools and
constitutional government. Gases and glory.
No insipid water." And Death's foremost
friends suffered from his embraces. It is a
melancholy fact which I should not omit to
place among the records of our contest, that
whereas the second inquiry into our sanitary
condition took place early in 1852, its principal
antagonist, the Squire, lost his sister by
fever before the year had closed; that relative
had previously lost a governess, who died of
typhus fever soon after the General Board
had been petitioned. The Squire's solicitor
lost his wife, and the ex-solicitor his
laundress, both dying of typhus fever in the
same year, 1852. It is also to be noted,
that the first man who was brought forward
to invalidate the petition for the introduction
of a Health Act, was himself added,
three months afterwards, to the list of dead
by typhus.

My own feeling upon such matters does
not lead me to deny any of the accusations
made against the sanitary state of Cess-cum-
Poolton. There is no denying that our life is
shortened; but let us not have that short life
bothered and vexed. When our old habits
are threatened with unsettlement, our old