LIVE STOCK AND CAPITAL.
Female Stock.
Schedule A.—
- 2,500 young maids, between 15 and 40.
- 2,500 damsels, of all ages.
- 2,500 widows.
- 2,500 old maids.
Young Maids with face and fortune, 100; with face without fortune, 900; with fortune without face, 500; with neither face nor fortune, 1,000; damsels ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto.
Widows with youth and money, 100; with youth and no money, 800; with money and no youth, 600; with neither youth nor money, 1,000.
Old Maids, monied, 100; moneyless, 700; fidgety, with money, 700; fidgety, without money, 1,000.
Male Stock.
- 2,500 young men, between 25 and 60.
- 2,500 bachelors, above 60.
- 2,500 widowers.
- 2,500 old men.
Young Men with whiskers, mustachoes, money, and connexion, 100; young men with money and connexion, but without whiskers, &c. 800; young men with whiskers, &c., but without money, 1,000; young men without money or whiskers, 600.
Bachelors with rheumatism and money, 500; without rheumatism and with money, 100; without money and with rheumatism, 700; with neither rheumatism nor money, 1,200.
Widowers with families and money, 500; with money and without families, 100; with families and without money, 800; with neither families nor money, 1,100.
Old Men, also Old Women, 500 requiring nurses; 500 not requiring nurses; 500 old men-women requiring nurses; bed-ridden, 1,000.
It is proposed to form the company of the above "Live Stock," the members of which are each to possess a share in each other. The young maids' class, No. 1, beauty, rank, and fortune, being the highest prizes—there are supposed to be a hundred of such prizes. The second class of prizes is rich old widows, with short lives, of which there are also a hundred. The third class of prizes is rich old maids, of which there are also a hundred. The fourth class comprehends beauty and intelligence; the fifth, beauty only; and so on in a sliding scale, but all prizes.
The male stock also comprehends a reciprocity system of prizes:—1st class, of the whiskered; 2d, no whiskered; 3d, monied and whiskered; and so on to widowers, with or without families, down to that least of all valuable of the genus homo, old men-women.
RULES.
Each subscriber of a pound annually to have one ticket, which shall entitle him to draw for each of the prizes on the 1st of April in every year, at Exeter Hall, under a commission selected from the "Lumber Troop."
The parties so fortunate as to draw a prize will have an introduction to the subject of it, and a match will be negotiated, if possible, without delay. Should the parties not suit each other, they will, upon the payment of another guinea, be privileged to draw again. But it is assumed, from a careful examination of matrimonial statistics drawn up by Dr. Lardner, that the matter of suitability will never be taken into consideration.
To facilitate its objects, a Normal seminary will be attached to the society, and a registrar engaged to marry at a reduced price, "that is, by the score."
Billy Blowmetight, Secretary.
RULE XX.
STOCKS, FUNDS, &c.
The monetary system of England is the ideal philosophy of political economists, who, in the conviction that "nothing exists," think it no "matter" to found a variety of hypotheses to give tangibility to the intangible, substance to accident, and reality to the abstract; in short, to personify "nothing."
These intangible tangibilities bear various names, such as Consols, Bank Stock, Indian Stock, Long Annuities, Exchequer Bills, &c. The aggregate of these 0 0 0 0 0 noughts are, by a peculiar process of national arithmetic, made to amount to Stock or Funds.
Stocks or Funds are the true substantials. In the golden ages of the world, cattle, corn, and merchandise were the medium of exchange among nations; but as men grew more enlightened, they agreed to represent these things by pieces of conventional metal. This at last becoming scarce, the world would have fallen into a state of hapless and irrecoverable ruin, but for the idea of a fictitious representation of a representation, of a non-existent which might have been.
Funds are therefore the to kalon, the absolute, the logos, the never-to-be-apprehended, the inscrutable, the supreme totality of "emptiness," the absolute cause, the absolute effect, the absolute concurrence of national faith; in short, the commercial "ideal" which all men worship, in its temples of the Bank and Stock Exchange.
Stocks are the "heaven of this religion," an agreeable hallucination, by which a variety of insane persons, called Stockholders or Fundholders, are permitted to roam at large under the conviction that they possess wealth. The public are compelled to believe in these fictitious representations, which are the foundation of the "imaginative system" in fiscal affairs, of the Bill and Credit system in commerce, and of the National Debt.
In England there is nothing truly national but this debt, or dead weight, which is the mighty pendulum which makes the national clock "go upon tick." It is the true foundation of political economy and of social faith or trust; "'pon tick" is the basis of the wealth and happiness of our country, which it makes the envy of the world and the glory of surrounding nations.
To be in debt argues credit, and credit respectability, and respectability means, and means resolve themselves into the Funds; here they merge into the blessed obscurity of "nothingness," and being absorbed by the same media, pass for a "something" which is far more formidable than "anything." Thus private wealth moves in a circle continually, making the round O from 0 (nothing) to 0 (nothing.)
Joint Stock.—Joint Stock Companies are so called from the projectors being generally "black legs," and their victims "raw Jemmies." The object of such companies is to give honesty the "cross buttock," to have a "shind eye" with capital, and to end in an "offal" bankruptcy.
From a consideration of the immediately preceding rules, and assuming as a fact the spiritual and ethereal nature of stock or capital, it is therefore proposed to found a Joint-Stock Company of unlimited capital, to be called the Boreal Pneumatic Joint-Stock Company, for "raising the wind," and making "darkness visible," or the National "Puff" Company.
Raising the wind has been the great problem of all financial operations. It is of far more importance than "raising the dead." The "wind" is a conventional term for the "needful." It is called wind because it is raised by various "Puffs."
There are various kinds of Puff; the Puff National, the Puff Medical, the Puff Legal, the Puff Literary, the "Puff Theatrical," and the Puff Scholastic.