This here measure sets out at a sort of full gallop, which is nothing more nor less than furious driving against us poor cabmen, by saying that it is "Enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty,"—which I don't deny that she is—and "with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual"—(them's the bishops: which I should like to know who ever seed a bishop in a cab, or on a 'bus, and therefore what have they to do with it?). The Act has twenty-two clauses; and every clause is intended to stick it into us. I shall take them clauses one by one, and if I use a little more license than the Commissioners like, they must recollect they makes us pay precious dear for our license, so we may as well have our say for our money.
1. Everybody who wants a license must apply in writing; so, if a poor unfortnate feller can't comply with the letter of the law by writing a letter which he never learnt to do, he must take to thieving, or something else, for he mustn't keep no cab, nor nothing.
2. The Commissioners is to have power to inspect your wehicles and your cattle whenever they like, so that when your 'bus is full and your passengers in a hurry to go by the train, you may all be pulled up while Sir Richard turns over the cushions, and sees if you've got any broken windows in your 'bus, or any broken winder drawin' of it. Of course nothin' will be good enough, unless we have velvet hottermans to keep the insides warm, and downy cushions for the outsides, as if we wasn't downy enough already. As to the horses, I don't know where we are to get 'em good enough. Praps they'll expect us to buy all the Derby winners and them sort of cattle to do our opposition work with. But I suppose there'll be a grant of money next year from the public purse, for private speckelation won't make it pay anyhow.
3. Purwides that, if we don't keep hansom private carriages for the public, and first-rate cattle to draw four on 'em about at three-halfpence a mile a-piece, we are to be fined three pounds a day, and go to prison a month for every day; so that, if we've done it for a whole year, we may be fined upards of a thousand pound, and be locked up for about five-and-thirty years. Consekwently three years would give us a hundred and five years imprisonment.
4. This takes all the crummy part of the bread out of our mouths by reducing our fares to sixpence a mile, which it used to be eightpence, which meant a shilling. Never mind! We'll get it out of 'em somehow, for we may charge twopence a package for luggage that won't go inside the cab; and we'll take care nothin' shall go in, for we'll have the doors so narrow that we can't be made to open our doors to imposition.
5. By this they compel us to have the fares painted up, and to carry a book of fares. What right have we to turn our cabs into a library or bookcase? When we make a mistake about a fare they always tell us we "ought to know the law." Why ought we to know it better than them as hires us? Let them carry books themselves. We've got enough to do to carry them.
6. In case of disputes the Police is to have it all their own way, for what they says is law, and what we says is nothin'.
7, 8, and 9. Compel us to go with anybody anywhere; give him a ticket with our number on—as if he couldn't use his eyes—and carry as many as our license says—though, sometimes, one fat rider would make three; so that if we get four such customers we shall as good as carry a dozen.
10. This is the unkindest cut of all, for it says we shall carry a "reasonable quantity of luggage." Why, with the women, there's no end to what they call a "reasonable quantity of luggage." I wish the Parlyment would have just settled that for us; for, if four females is going off to a train to spend a month at the sea-side, who is to say what will be a "reasonable quantity" of bonnet-boxes, carpet-bags, pet dogs, and bird-cages, that each on 'em may want to carry?
11. This makes us pay for other people's carelessness; for if anybody goes and leaves anything in any of our cabs, we mustn't earn another sixpence by taking another fare, but we must drive off in search of a police-station; and how, in our innocence, are we to know where to look for such places? If we don't, we must pay ten pounds penalty or stay a month in prison.