A week previously, the Scotchman states, the Haddingtonians had devoted a day to fasting and humiliation in the hope that the pestilence might be averted from them.
Fasting involves self-denial. The Haddington fasters cannot deny themselves to the amount of 10d. in the pound. They cannot fling that tenpence into the gutter, to sweep it, although the gutter is poisoning their poor neighbours, and may poison themselves too.
Christians are supposed to wash their faces when they fast. Whether the Haddington housekeepers accompany their fasting with any ablution may be doubted, since they refuse to pay 10d. in the pound for washing their town. By preference, for cheapness sake, they would rather perhaps fast in sackcloth and ashes; but as all sackcloth is now used up in sacks, whilst ashes are carted away for manure, their fasting possibly consists in wearing their usual clothes, and sitting still in their usual filth, and doing nothing. Whether they abstain from anything else—from haggis or sheep's head, or collops, or whiskey-toddy—in addition to abstinence from wholesome exertion—we do not know.
As to the Scotch Lion playing second fiddle in the Royal Arms, he may bless the sometime Duke of Argyle and his stars, and be contented to have any place there to fiddle in at all. By all heraldic right he ought to be ousted altogether, and his place should be occupied by the more appropriate emblem of a Pig; a whining, grunting, odoriferous Hog Rampant, sprawling in the filth of towns.
GARE LA GAROTTE.
Our friend and contemporary the Sunday Times (whose zeal for the spread of Democracy, for the non-suppression of Betting Houses, and for the purification of the Turf and the Church, we gladly recognise), in commenting upon an excellent article in which the daily Times dissuades the charitable from encouraging street mendicancy, has the following startling remarks:—
"While on this part of the subject, we would suggest the impolicy of withholding from the metropolitan mendicants, whether impostors or not, the scanty means of support.... We would counsel the old ladies and gentlemen not to hold their hands, lest the sturdy vagabond, who now contents himself with extracting pence from their humanity by whining, should take to strangling them in the dark streets, as some members of the fraternity have lately done in Manchester."
Really, Mr. Punch, who believes that in his time he has done no bad service to the cause of real Democracy (by which he means a system for the benefit of the many and not of the few), begs to say that these utterances by the "Champion of Democracy," are more worthy of one of the ruined clients of the Sunday Times, the Betting House Keepers (who may now be properly termed vagabonds), than of a respectable journalist with his faculties in order. Threatening decent people with strangulation because they decline to assist imposture, is rather a strong argument. Luckily, there be things called Policemen.