LEADING ARTICLE FOR OLD LADIES.
(On the proposed New Coinage.)
We are, and always were, averse to change. We do not mean to say that we have, or ever had, any objection to those coppers which long custom has hallowed, and which have been consecrated to charity. But when innovation would tamper with the coin of the realm, we, in common with all Her Majesty's loyal subjects, are necessitated to rally round the Sovereign, not only as such, but as represented by monetary subordinates. And when we observe that one of the principal features in the contemplated revolution is the abolition of the Half-Crown, we cannot but consider the Crown, and with the Crown the Throne, and of course the Church to be placed in jeopardy. In short, we must record our emphatic protest against the proposed Decimal Currency. It was under the old arrangement of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings, that the country attained to its present pitch of glory and prosperity. That the Decimal system has been adopted by foreigners is the very reason why we should persist in our own. What is it that makes them so eager to take our money, if not its acknowledged superiority to theirs?
The democratic, indeed the levelling character of the decimal agitation is obvious from one remarkable fact, which, may, perhaps, however, be new to our readers. It is notorious that the lower classes are addicted to the use of slang or flash language, especially in connection with pugilism. Now we have already had introduced a coin of foreign denomination, but domestic orthography. We allude to the piece of money termed a florin, a word which, as spelt by the populace—as many of them as can spell at all—signifies the act of knocking or being knocked down. It is proposed that one of the new-fangled coins shall bear the yet more vulgar appellation of a mil; which in the same vocabulary signifies a fistic encounter.
From a Parliamentary Commission subservient to a Downing Street gang, thus evidently deriving the nomenclature of their projected coinage on the one hand from Continental Jews, Papists, and Infidels; and on the other from the Brummagem Chicken and the Tipton Slasher, what can we expect but the overthrow of all our ancient institutions, unless the blow which they are about to aim at all that we hold tender, be parried by a determined exertion of the art of self-defence?
A Regular Pump.—An eminent teetotaller being requested by "a few of his admirers" to sit for his portrait, consented, on condition that it should be taken in water-colours.
