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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: vested wrongs, vested superstitions, and the whole vis inertiae of
the world, the flesh, and the devil. They were guilty indeed, in
this case, not merely of ignorance of human nature, but of
forgetfulness of fact. Did they not know that the excellent New
Poor-law was greeted with the curses of those very farmers and
squires who now not only carry it out lovingly and willingly to
the very letter, but are often too ready to resist any improvement
or relaxation in it which may be proposed by that very Poor-law
Board from which it emanated? Did they not know that Agricultural
Science, though of sixty years' steady growth, has not yet
penetrated into a third of the farms of England; and that hundreds
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