Every year the pinch of poverty grew sharper. My own respectable young servant could not marry her decent lover because rent was so dear. As roomy lodging-houses and hotels spread along the sea-front, speculation grew, and the mass of the people were huddled together in smoky cram or squeezed out into dreary suburbs, far away from their work or from opportunities for honest industry. I soon also learned the horror with which the poor regard the workhouse; how they would willingly die in peace in the forlornest home rather than be forced into what they regard as a hopeless, cruel prison. My indignation deepened as I thought of the deed still in our archives, in which, ‘I, Petronilla de Cham, of Hastings, in the pure and lawful power of my widowhood,’ grant a tract of land for maintaining the poor old men and women of Hastings in decent maintenance and godly service; the brothers and sisters of the Magdalen Hospital. ‘And I, Lady Petronilla and my heirs will warrant and defend the aforesaid five acres of land with precincts, to be held by the brothers and sisters freely, quietly, well, and peacefully for ever,’ they praying for the souls of their benefactors. As descendants of humane and pious ancestors, it seems to be as clearly a religious duty to consider the condition of the poor in 1885 as it was in 1292, when Lady Petronilla de Cham made her foundation gift to the Magdalen Charity. The more I considered this important problem of how to aid the struggling poor in their heroic efforts to live decently, the more important to my mind became the subject of taxation; how the rates of a town are raised, and how they are expended. Unhappily, we see all over the country that, in the same way, ancient endowments for doles, retreats, pensions, and portions are swept away because the workhouse system is said to provide for the poor; ancient endowments for training, clothing, and apprenticing poor children are also swept away, because the ‘Board of Education provides for the poor.’ Thus the various necessities of social life, education, benevolence, etc., are being committed to the hands of officials--_i.e._, everything is rapidly being thrown upon the rates, until the rates crush the poor into pauperism.