Individuals in a respectable sphere of life, who could formerly keep a page, have been obliged to turn over a new leaf; and it is a positive fact that a Conservative peer intends, in the ensuing Session, putting down a Brougham.
But it is not only among old and established interests that the burden will be felt, for it is ascertained beyond doubt that the boys will be alarming sufferers. The toffey dealers have already commenced manufacturing an inferior article, which is being palmed off upon the juveniles as the genuine Everton. We have personally analysed a piece of Albert rock, under the new system, and we have discovered an increased proportion of sand in its composition. It is also a lamentable fact that a baked potato man has stopped up—we hope not permanently—one of the chimneys of his apparatus, besides extinguishing one of the fine lanterns with which it is adorned—a piece of retrenchment that will fall first on the oilman, and ultimately on the whale-fishing interests.
An influential publican has shockingly reduced his only potboy, and the unhappy lad is walking about the streets on a salary four per cent. under that of last year—a miserable victim to the income-tax, and a martyr (of course) to Tory ascendancy.
Respectable families, who never before considered the matter worth a thought, are looking narrowly to the candle-ends, giving, it is true, a momentary impulse to the trade in save-alls, but the flush is feverish, and will, of course, be followed by depression. The perquisites thus lost, by a stoppage in the kitchen-stuff commerce, can only be made up by the servants taking it out of their masters' bones, which used formerly to be abandoned to the grubbers, who must in future look for grub in some other direction.
The penny-a-liners have also been lowered, in order to enable some of the newspaper proprietors to pay the income-tax, but it is expected this reduction will be counterbalanced by the increase in the number of cases of real distress, and the other raw articles which form the staple of paragraphs.
AIR-UM SCARE-UM TRAVELLING.
"Who's for the excursion round the moon?
Here's the 'Original Fly Balloon.'"
"Is it this that calls
At the top of St. Paul's,