SHORTCOMING OF THE CITY.
The City of London is not quite Plato's Model Republic. It has not completely realized its idea of corporate perfection. Not permitting the subjects of its jurisdiction to measure or to carry their own commodities, it has established corn, coal, fruit, and oyster-meters, and fellowship-porters, whom it obliges them to employ on terms prescribed by itself. But it does not carry out the principle of preventing individuals from managing their own affairs, by prohibiting them from doing anything whatever for themselves, which it is possible that somebody else may do for them. It has not established Civic Barbers, empowered to shave all men who reside within its precincts, whether willing or unwilling to submit their chins to those officers, and it does not deny anybody the right of shaving himself.
"There—that was a portrait of my Mother's Father, painted by Le Sange, in 1802."
"La! What Guys our Grandfathers made of themselves!"
Corporate Asylums.
The prisons of the City seem, in general, to have been better conducted than any other of its institutions. May this fact be accounted for on the supposition that roguery has an instinctive tendency to provide for itself?