HOW TO GET INTO PARLIAMENT.
Supposing yourself to be a green yokel, just raw from school, with little wit, little money, and little influence, act as follows:—
1. Marry for the sake of respectability and a little more money.
2. Give away soup to the poor, flannel petticoats, trusses, and baby linen.
3. Set up schools on the free system, "every boy his own archbishop:" Free-trade in religion, and no walloping.
4. Get into a squabble with your Rector, about free grace and non-election.
5. Write once a week in the dissenters' "slop pail," against clerical intolerance, tithe pigs, "red noses," round paunches, lawn sleeves.
6. Attend the jawy jobations of Exeter hall, as a "flowery speaker," and advocate various Jew, Gipsy, Voluntary Church, Anti-pseudo-baptistical Societies, till you are black in the face.
7. Join the Society for the Diffusion of Useless Knowledge, the Donkey Protecting Society, and other congenial "Institutes."
8. Build a chapel, and bribe a congregation to come to it. Become a teetotaller; be a betwixt and betweenish, half-and-half, out-and-out radical. Defeat the imposition of a Church rate—rave against the taxes—pledge yourself to support triangular parliaments, universal suffering—blindfold voting—and confusion to all order.
And thus get in, get in,
By clamour, bawl, and shout;
To tax 'em then begin;
Oh then get out, get out.
Get in, get in, get in,
Give place to sneak and lout,
And don't forget your kin;
Oh then get out, get out.
Get in, get in, get in,
Get jolly fat and stout,
And grind the people thin;
Oh then get out, get out.
Get in, get in, get in,
And turn and twist about,
Until some precious shin—
Dy—says, "Get out, get out."
MEASURING BY THE "YARD"—TRUE FIT.
RULE XVI.
DUODECIMALS;
OR,
THE MEASURING OF PAINTING, PLASTERING, JOINING, GLAZING, GLOZING, AND OTHER FLAT WORK.
Duodecimals teach us to find the superficial contents of any "thing." A thing is properly something, neither woman nor man; possessing all the superficial of either, and the substantials of neither: such as numbsculls, lordlings, quacks, empirics, &c.
Duodecimals also teach the mensuration of plastering, painting and glazing; which comprehend the arts of palaver and gammon, and the science of Flattery in general.
This is, above all others, a "superficial age," and the mensuration of superficies is characteristic of the modern era—the age of meretricious flummery. Our science is superficial thinking; our morality, superficial blinking. Every thing is made now-a-days for the "surface," which, like the gilded wooden organ pipes, placed in front of that instrument, are not made to blow, but for the sake of show. In learning, we get a smattering instead of the real thing; and we drop the meat for the sake of the shadow. The deep and the solid have long ago been discarded: in short, this is the age of gammon, and society is like a quire of "outsides foolscap."
Of Flat Surfaces.—A plane or flat surface has length and breadth without thickness. Flat surfaces are often made, by some peculiar property of polarized light, to reflect rays which do not belong to them. Thus, flats pass for solids, and "shallows" for "deep-uns."
RULE XVII.
BOOK-KEEPING AND ACCOUNTS.
Book-keeping is not to be understood only as the art of "Book-borrowing," a very good science in its way, but as the highest branch of the science of legerdemain, invented for the express purpose of enabling the speculative to conceal their accounts, just as the use of speech is given to man to enable him to conceal his thoughts.
We have excellent directions given us on this head from very high authority, which is to be understood according to the Benthamite Philosophy. "How much owest thou my lord? And he said, A hundred measures of oil. Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty." Hence the children of the philosophers are wiser than the children of light.
In "keeping books" it is not only indispensable that you should keep them, but that they also should "keep you." This is in accordance with the free-trade reciprocity system; and to enable them to do it requires but little tact. For instance, you open a shop—not for the purpose of doing business, but for doing some unfortunate flat, in the very spirit of a "Good-will;" so that when your business is done, your client may find his business done too, and when you have taken yourself off, he may find himself taken in. This example may be repeated any number of times.
Upon entering life, every young man must consider that it will be quite impossible to live without some "cash in hand;"—that he will, at times, be inevitably called upon to "fork out," "dub up," or "come down;"—and that in all transactions, such as swelling and dashing, cutting and flashing, it will be necessary to keep a sharp look-out upon the "blunt," tin, or pewter, as it is variously termed; if not for your own satisfaction, at least for your beloved father's, whom you are in duty bound to bamboozle. There are certain items which never need come into this account; namely, board, lodging, tailor's bills, boots, shoes, linen, horses, and such like necessaries; these belong religiously to the old boy, or are fit and proper matters for "whitewashing."
To fulfil this purpose, open a cash account, putting Dr. in the left hand corner, which signifies Dear Father, in honour of your respected parent, or in testimony that everything is dear; and Cr. on the right hand, which may signify "cruel little I have to spend." This is called the Waste Book. The items introduced are merely hints for the getting and disbursement of Cash.