HUMAN COPYING MACHINES.
Everybody says the law has gone to ruin, and if this is the case, we can only say that the law has gone where it has brought so many—or in other words, that the lawyers have followed their clients. The "profession" must certainly be at a low ebb when it is reduced to the degradation of issuing such advertisements as the following, which has been sent up to us by several Correspondents, who have cut it out from a Birmingham newspaper.
WANTED, immediately, in a Country Solicitor's Office, a WRITING CLERK. He must understand Abstracting, Engrossing, and Accounts. Salary about 13s. a week. Unexceptionable references must be given.—Apply to——, Solicitor, Birmingham.
We have been told that "necessity has no law;" but it would seem that the law is reduced to the last stage of necessity, or it would never offer such beggarly terms as those specified above to the very meanest of its myrmidons. "Thirteen shillings a week" is about one-third of the pay of a journeyman carpenter, and less than a third of what may be earned by many of those who are out "on strike" for higher wages. The poor wretch who is offered thirteen shillings a week must, it seems, understand "abstracting;" but we should fear that he might try his abilities in endeavouring to "abstract" something from the cash-box of his principal. It is evident that the lawyers, having been curtailed of their power to fleece the public, are determined to take it out of their unfortunate clerks, and if blood can be got out of a stone, an attorney is just the man to perform the operation.
A MUFF DROPPED, by a young Lady, on Wednesday last, in the Regent's Park, between the Botanical and Zoological Gardens. It is rather rich in appearance, but extremely heavy; has very long hair, and nothing whatever inside. Any one, falling in with the above, is perfectly welcome to the acquisition, as the Muff became such a dead weight, continually hanging about, and wanting to be carried everywhere, that the Young Lady, not being able to bear it any longer, was really compelled to drop it. The Muff may be known at any time by its having red hair, and answering to the name of Charles.