"When men live in small communities, ... they cannot avoid personal participation in some public functions. So it was in the older rural England, before the organic social changes of the last century. Where a family might go without its winter firing, if the Lord of the Manor prohibited the cutting of turf and the collection of wood, every tenant would be a self-appointed member of a Commons Preservation Society. Much satire has been wasted over the Parish Pump; but one can understand the interest that humble installation must have possessed for the little group of households, which had to draw their own water from it daily in their own buckets. There were civic duties to discharge as well as civic rights to vindicate."