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.