within a circle of twenty miles from the General Post-office, of the several amounts of one penny, fourpence, and eightpence per ton. The net produce of the three branches of coal-duty in 1852 was L.179,857; but upon this some heavy charges exist, and in the same year the city only was able to apply L.15,305 to its own use. All persons acting as brokers within the city must be admitted by the court of aldermen ; and an annual payment of L.5 from each is required; also, no one can exercise any retail trade who is not free of the city; and upon admission to the freedom, a fine is imposed. These are some of the principal rights and privileges now exercised by the corporation of London; and with the exception of the coal-tax, which it is proposed to retain at present, they are all abolished by the new bill. Some great changes will also be introduced into the constitution of the corporation itself: the number of aldermen will be reduced to sixteen, and their separate court altogether abolished; the number of common councilmen will also be lessened, and they with the aldermen will form only one court; but to them will be intrusted the election of all officers, including the lord-mayor; and for that office all citizens with a small property qualification will be eligible. The aldermen still retain their places as police magistrates, but they and the lord-mayor will cease to sit in the central criminal court. These are the most important provisions of this bill, the object of which is to administer to the city of London that measure of reform which the other municipal corporations of the kingdom underwent in the year 1835, but which London at the time avoided. At present, nothing seems to have been attempted but the remedy of its most pressing defects. NANA SAHIB. As we have no doubt that many of our readers would be glad to be acquainted with the parentage and other antecedents of the man who bears this blood-stained name, we propose, in the present article, to give a brief sketch of him. Nana Sahib, Rajah of Bithoor-whose correct name is Sree Munt Dhoondoo Punt-is the eldest son, by adoption, of the late Badjee Rao, ex-Peishwa of the Mahrattas. and that the pension to be settled upon himself and his family should not be less than eight lacs of rupees that is, L.80,000 per annum. After long and anxious deliberation with his prime minister and other great officers of state, the Peishwa accepted these proposals-went with his family and adherents into the British camp-and Bithoor was afterwards assigned as his residence. The East India Company, with their usual grasping and illiberal spirit of covetousness, were displeased with Sir John Malcolm for his granting these terms. But they, and the governor-general, Lord Hardinge, could not recede from them; and they took care to limit the stipulated allowance to the smallest sum mentioned in the treaty-namely, eight lacs of rupees, or L.80,000 per annum. We have stated that the pension was to be conferred upon Badjee Rao and his family. Now, before we proceed further, we must mention, that by the Hindoo Shasters, or scriptures, there is a fearful doom awarded against those who die childless; that doom is, the being consigned, after death, to 'a place called Put, a place of horror, to which the manes of the childless are supposed to go, there to be tormented with hunger and thirst, for want of these oblations of food and libations of water, at prescribed periods, which it is the pious, and indeed indispensable duty of a living son to offer.' * Such are the principles of the Hindoo religion with regard to the want of natural male issue. Now, the same principles, in order to remedy the defect, permit the system of adoption where natural issue fails. It was in accordance with this that Badjee Rao, in his old age, finding himself naturally childless as to male issue, by his will declared Nana Sahib to be his eldest son, heir, and representative. In his day, Badjee Rao, as chief of the powerful Mahratta nation, had been a great sovereign. He survived his downfall-exercising civil and criminal jurisdiction, on a limited scale, at Bithoorthirty-five years. On the 28th of January 1851, he died. No sooner was his death made officially known, than Lord Dalhousie tabled a minute at the council board of Calcutta, ruling that the pension, expressly guaranteed to the great Badjee Rao, and his family, should not be continued to the latter. Nana Sahib, Badjee Rao's widows, and the other members of his family, were naturally stricken with grief and terror. They saw themselves reduced to poverty. They had no other pecuniary resource than some trifling sum which Badjee Rao had left behind him. For many years previous to his death, Badjee Rao had been a dethroned pensioner of the East India Company. When in the fulness of his power, he had, as a native prince, assisted the East India Company in their war against Tippoo Sahib, the tiger of On the 24th of June 1851, Nana Sahib forwarded Seringapatam; and, as a reward for his doing so, the a memorial to the lieutenant-governor of the NorthCompany, after years of strife with him-after nego- west Provinces of India on the subject. In reply, he tiations and exactions, and treaties, and violations of was told that the pension could not be continued, these treaties on their part-contrived, in 1817, to but that a certain tract of land would be his for get hold of his dominions. After numerous and fierce life. The commissioner of Bithoor, a public officer conflicts, Badjee Rao, at the head of 8000 men, and of high rank and standing, and who knew the cirwith an advantageous post, was prepared to do battle cumstances and claims of the ex-Peishwa's family, for the sovereignty of the Deccan; when Brigadier-forwarded an urgent appeal on their behalf; but, in general Sir John Malcolm, who commanded the British army, sent a flag of truce to him, with proposals for a surrender. The proposals made on the part of Sir John Malcolm were, that Badjee Rao, the Peishwa of the Mahrattas, should renounce his sovereignty altogether; that he should come, within twenty-four hours, with his family and a limited number of his adherents and attendants, into the British camp; that they should there be received with honour and respect; that he should be located in the holy city of Benares, or in some other sacred place of Hindostan; that he should have a liberal pension from the East India Company for himself and his family; that his old and attached adherents should be provided for; a letter from the secretary of the governor-general, of date September the 24th, 1851, he received a severe reprimand for so doing. His recommendation was stigmatised as 'uncalled for and unwarrantable.' After some further efforts in India, Nana Sahib addressed the Court of Directors, at Leadenhall Street, in England. His appeal to them was dated the 29th of December 1852. In the eyes of the East India Company, the appeals of native princes of India do not seem to have been matters of much consequence. The Company appear to have considered that it added to their dignity to have the advocates of such princes waiting in their • Strange's Elements of Hindoo Law. anterooms. Somewhere about December 1853, the Company sent back Nana Sahib's memorial to the government in India, and the result was, that nothing was done. It would appear that Nana Sahib, with smooth and gentlemanly manners, unites superior abilities; and that to these abilities he adds passions of the strongest and most vindictive nature. His spirit is high, and his vehemence of the most determined character. At the period of the breaking out of the mutiny which has rendered his name infamous, he seems to have become a monomaniac on the subject of what he believed to be his wrongs. In the preceding sketch, subject, of course, to correction, we have endeavoured to state facts, not with a view to advocating any cause, but simply for the purpose of communicating to our readers information as to some of the numerous causes which have led to the dreadful events which have recently occurred in the East. All this, we repeat, was the work of a single day, and it came off in one public place-before the townhouse of Amsterdam. The account seems to have suggested to the citizens of the time merely that the hangman-business was a thriving one (dat zulk eene executie eene goede neering zy). To us in our day and generation, it is an interesting document, as a fragment, and a genuine one, of the history of those days which people in Holland and Germany, and some other parts of the world too, are wont to call 'the good old times.' AN OLD MAID'S RETROSPECTIONS. I LOOK into the dreamy past, and see-what do I see? to me! space [We have been informed that an Oriental named Azimullah was in London in 1855, for the purpose of making a last appeal in behalf of his employer, Nana Sahib. He lodged in a respectable private hotel in George Street, Hanover Square, where a friend of They look like visions now, but then, how real were they ours, living in the same house, formed his acquaint- I see my girlhood full of hope, my lover true and brave; ance, was entertained by him in gentlemanlike style In fancy still I hear his vow, as a pledge of truth he gave. at dinner, and found him a well-bred, agreeable per- It was a ring: he smiling said: "Twill serve to guard the son, of good intelligence about English matters. Our friend, on lately revisiting the house, learned from its proprietor that the polite Azimullah, before departing from England, shewed symptoms of a moody and soured feeling, and let fall several hints to the effect that England would yet regret the manner in which it had used his master. This same Azimullah has since appeared in the dismal transactions connected with the destruction of the Cawnpore garrison.ED.] AN EXECUTIONER'S LITTLE BILL. THE following notice of the doings of the hands of justice, in a neighbouring country, in the year 1712, may not be without some historic interest; and certainly it is calculated to make one rather contented than otherwise with the state of Europe in 1858. In the year 1712, it was the custom in Amsterdam to make use of the services of an executioner from the neighbouring town of Haarlem; and in order to avoid the expense of repeated journeys, the worthy magistrates contrived that the various sentences of the criminal law should be carried out as much as possible on the same day. The following is the little bill of the Haarlem Calcraft for the work of a single day: Florins. 6 3 3 3 6 888 Upon thy finger, till I put another in its place.' band Though tethered by a golden chain to this poor withered hand. And it was in that girlish time when I perchance might see They were in mine-those fruits, from seed sown by the hand of Care. Now, whiter than the snow-clad hill, or foam that crests the wave, Are my thin locks; his weary head rests in a foreign grave. Ay, maidens, you may sigh; God grant that happier be your lot; For me, no power could make me wish this true-love dream forgot. But after all my pains, my fears, my visions of the past, 3 One ever-present hope of mine will be fulfilled at last; And I am happy, for I know my bridal draweth nigh 27 6 9 18 3 24 3 12 72 HOF POPULAR LITERATURE Science and Arts. CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS. No. 223. SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1858. POLITICAL ECONOMY. MEN of science are rarely popular characters. Without incurring, as a general rule, much dislike or ill-will from their neighbours, they are not usually favourites, either individually or as a class. They are sometimes objects of a not very friendly curiosity, sometimes of what very nearly approaches to contempt, on the part of the vulgar. The gentleman whose days are spent in roaming over hill and dale in search of a small fern or a rare species of grass, is considered by the wondering rustics to be wasting his time in a strange kind of busy idleness. The chemist's housemaid can barely refrain from despising, while she pities, the master whose life is spent in a close room, amid glass bottles and bad smells. The conventional type of the scientific student, as we find him in novels and in the minds of novel-readers, is generally a subject for good-humoured pity or sarcastic ridicule. Spectacles, a shabby coat, and an unclean shirt-collar, are his outward apparel; the inner man is clothed in stolid indifference to the fate of mankind, and wrapped in devotion to the study of butterflies or the calculation of logarithms. But certain classes of scientific men are liable to yet worse treatment. As each department of knowledge is rescued from the domain of prejudice and conjecture, and made the subject of systematic inquiry, | a persecution, social if not legal, is sure to be the doom of the adventurous investigator. So it was in the days of Galileo with the astronomers; so it has been, in more recent times, with the anatomists, whose practice of dissection drew down upon them a storm of popular execration which has hardly yet subsided. But perhaps no science was ever more unpopular, and no body of philosophical writers ever so heartily abused and decried, as political economy and the political economists. Among the vulgar and ignorant of all ranks, indeed, the very name of political economy excites a shout of ridicule or a smile of contempt. Among more earnest and more observant people, there is often found a spirit of bitter and irrational hatred towards this obnoxious science, which argues a strong though unacknowledged suspicion of its truth and importance. The wholly ignorant may indeed sneer at what they cannot understand; but men revile generally what they fear. And there is a certain class of men, prejudiced, obstinate, ill-informed, but earnest and philanthropic withal, to whom the name of economical science is indeed a sound of terror, and in whose eyes an economist is an intolerable abomination. They hate the science, because it reveals to them stern laws and stubborn facts: laws, to which their PRICE ltd. systems must, on pain of failure, conform; facts, by which their best laid schemes for the improvement and elevation of mankind must often be baffled and overthrown. Starting in horror from the vision, they turn indignantly upon the prophet, and charge him with an attempt to deceive them—not because they have detected any error in his demonstrationsnot because they can convict him of ignorance or misrepresentation-but simply because he would not 'prophesy unto them smooth things.' They accuse him of harshness, selfishness, cruelty, as if he had created the laws which he explains. They denounce him as indifferent to human wretchedness, because he points out the sources from which wretchedness has arisen, and from which, so long as they are suffered to exist, it must continue to arise. And their outcry is echoed by thousands, who are too ignorant to know what it is they are criticising, and too indolent for the labour of mastering a new and difficult study. It does not seem to strike these gentlemen, that, after all, they are only, as the American critic says, 'screaming at the calm facts of the universe.' As little does it occur to the herd of clamourers to inquire into the nature, the purpose, and the sources of the science they denounce and reject. on Political economy is, in very truth, the science of philanthropy. It is the study of human welfare, so far as that welfare depends upon material prosperity-the investigation of the means by which nations attain to wealth, and classes to comfort. It is the exposition, in a word, of those laws of nature which regulate the material condition of communities and individuals-of the causes which depends the question, whether this man or that body of men shall or shall not have enough to spare of this world's gear-shall or shall not enjoy their fair share of this life's blessings. It is the science which shews how material good may be wrought, and social amelioration effected-which teaches us what objects can be achieved for mankind by human efforts, and in what manner and by what means those objects can be attained. It is perfectly true that it deals only with the grosser conditions of happiness. Except in so far as they bear on those conditions, it leaves education to the schoolmaster, and morality to the pastor. These are no more within the province of the economist, than within that of the physician or the astronomer: his business is simply to explain what are the laws of nature relative to the material wellbeing of mankind, not to discuss the comparative importance of material and moral advancement, or the effect of wealth upon the intellect and virtue of men and nations. His office is not to teach how men are to be made wise or good, but how they may be supplied with food and raiment. It is not his function to aid and to advise the clergyman or the moralist, but to guide the labours and enlighten the path of the practical philanthropist and the social reformer. Such being the nature and such the functions' of political economy, it is obviously incumbent on every one who aspires to confer immediately solid benefits on his fellow-men, to improve their material condition, to study carefully the laws upon which that condition depends. The physician does not attempt the cure of physical suffering without cautious study, not merely of the individual disease, but of all the ills that flesh is heir to. His youth is a long training in the knowledge of the human frame; he has made himself acquainted with every part of its wonderful mechanism; he has made himself familiar with all its operations; he knows the laws which regulate those operations, and the disturbances to which they are liable. Not until he has acquired this knowledge, not until he has been qualified for the task by this course of laborious study, is he intrusted with the care of patients and the cure of disease. The empiric who disdains this preparation or shrinks from this toil, lays hold of some nostrum, and vaunts it to the world as an infallible remedy for all corporeal diseases. He finds credulous listeners: perhaps he manages to kill a few of them; but for so doing he is liable to severe legal punishment, if his victims have friends more sceptical than themselves. Unhappily, the quack who practises on the social body, is liable to no such penalties: no course of study is thought necessary for him; to see evil, and to be anxious to redress it, is esteemed a sufficient qualification. The results of this empirical philanthropy are every day made manifest in some new form of disastrous blundering. The zealous friends of some distressed class are anxious to alleviate their sufferings-often intolerably severe-sometimes aggravated by gross oppression or neglect on the part of others. Work is terribly hard; wages are shamefully low. These grievances must be redressed; an association is formed, and public meetings are called on behalf of the sufferers. Facts and incidents of appalling distress are brought to light, and humanity is shocked, and benevolence terrified by the revelation. Subscriptions are poured in; a committee is formed; aid is freely given. How is it that distress is so rarely cured? Relieved for the time it may be; but neither public benevolence nor legislative interference can permanently eradicate it; and the earnest and largehearted men who have been striving for its cure, turn away in sickness of heart, and, according to their temper, marvel at the failure of their labours, or curse political economy, and those who warned them that such failure was all they had to expect. They had set to work with an utter ignorance and disregard of the only method in which their objects could possibly be attained. They had cut off the head of the weed, and left the root in the soil; what wonder that it soon sprouted afresh? They had repressed the symptoms of the disease; they had cooled the fevered skin, and healed up the unsightly sore; but they had not even touched the seat of the evil: they were utterly ignorant of its real nature. Can they marvel if the patient died under their hands? The physician stood by their side, and warned them: they would not hear him. They believed that all social suffering was the result of human wrong, and might be amended by human justice and charity. They obstinately refused to learn that the social condition of mankind depends, in great part, upon laws as certain as those which regulate the motions of the planetary bodies; that poverty, squalor, starvation, are evils which charity alone can no more eradicate, than it can prevent typhus fever or cholera. Social evils and physical diseases alike may be alleviated or averted by a careful attention to the warnings of science: neither can be mitigated or extirpated by any other means. The laws of social economy are not less certain than those of medical science. It is certain that when in any place population is overcrowded, that place will be unhealthy. It is certain that when in any trade there are more labourers than suffice for the work, there will be low wages, hard work, scant food. These things must be. We cannot remove them by denying them. What wisdom and goodness can do, is only to recognise the consequence, and to attempt the eradication of the cause. He The reason, then, of the unpopularity which attaches to the name of political economy, is simply the popular aversion to painful truths. This aversion manifests itself in an obstinate reluctance to recognise the disagreeable fact, and an angry denunciation of those who enforce its claim to attention. The economist demonstrates to the poor that their poverty arises mainly from causes altogether beyond the control of legislature or aristocracy; and he is denounced as a partisan of existing evil by every agitator whose pet theme is the injustice and oppression of the rich. He explains to the ill-paid labourer that wages are not dependent on the caprice of the employer, but on the condition of the labour-market; and he is hated as an ally of the master and an enemy of the men. sets forth calmly the nature of the social machinery which regulates the adjustment of supply and demand; and he is cursed by the socialist visionary as the advocate of that terrible ogre and bugbear-Competition. It would surprise many of those who delight in reviling what they are too impatient to study, were they informed that the ablest and most impartial summary of communistic theories and aspirations ever given to the world is contained in an economical treatise by one of the greatest living masters of the science. But Mr John Stuart Mill takes care distinctly to explain what may, and what may not, be hoped from any improvements in the organisation of industry. He indulges in no visions, and gives vent to no rhapsodies. The dreamer revels in a socialistic paradise; the economist points out not only by what steps that vision may be realised, if its realisation be possible, but how many evils there are which no such realisation would remove, and what its actual worth and value would be. But dreamers are ill-pleased with those who thus criticise their illusions; they cannot endure the man who coolly weighs the gold and tests the jewels of their fairyland. It is to the man who is intent rather on doing good than on dreaming of it, that political economy appeals. To him it indicates the means of beneficence; it realises the intentions of the philanthropist, and teaches him how to be charitable without being a patron of vice, and how to make his benevolence a permanent blessing to others, rather than a present gratification to himself. Men who are anxious rather for the praise and pleasure of generosity than for the solid results of beneficence, cannot be expected to study such a science, or to walk by its precepts. Men who, like the ostrich, think to evade the laws of nature by blinding their eyes to their operation, may loudly denounce the exponent of truths unwelcome to them. So in Galileo's day was the revolution of the earth on its axis condemned as heresy, and persecuted as blasphemy. 'Still it does move,' in spite of the inquisitors; and still, in spite of its unpopularity, political economy continues to be a science, and the laws of nature, which it is the function of that science to explain, continue to operate. Only by regarding those laws is there hope of effecting any permanent improvement in the condition of any class or community; and while they are disregarded, the more good is attempted, the more evil is likely to result. Truth is strong, however; and the economists may appeal with confidence to Time for the justice which popular caprice now denies them, and for the respect due to those who have conscientiously laboured at a task harsh, indeed, and ungrateful, but second to none in human interest, or in importance to humanity. THE OLD BABY. stuffed fish, to devote the hours of the night to sleep, and not to gormandising? If not-since in these respects alone have I offended-why have I thus been punished? I am no longer the idol of my once doting mother, the pride of my father, the boast of my nurse. The conversation which is now addressed to me ceases to be distinguished by those endearing epithets with which it was so liberally garnished, and is no longer studiously couched in terms supposed to be especially suitable to the infant ear: TAKING advantage of the facilities afforded by the last transatlantic invention, the Thought-reflectora boon indeed to those who are too idle, or incompetent, to express their ideas in speech, and a very great improvement upon the rude copying-machine which could only reiterate mere words-I venture to submit to a discerning public the grievance under which not I alone, but the vast majority of my fellow-infants are labouring. Few and favoured are those childrenin-arms who have no cause to range themselves under my banner. Blessed is the babe whose parents have preserved the unities in never associating with it a rival and a usurper. Happy indeed is that ex-acter, were perpetually being submitted to my notice; ceptional infant who has never yet been stigmatised as the Old Baby. I was born of the masculine gender, with a bald head, like Sir John Falstaff, and partycoloured, precisely three hundred and sixty-four days ago. To-morrow, at 4.30 in the morning, to an instant, I shall have arrived at a year, if not of discretion, at least of human experience. I shall be 'going on' for two years old. This consideration by no means intoxicates me with a boastful joy. To live, as I have already learned, alas! is but another name for to suffer. In this little span of life, what vicissitude of fortune have I even now endured! How Time's inevitable yoke has bowed my little neck and pressed my chin into my bib! I would that it had been permitted to me to remain for ever lobster-red, spotty, fishy-eyed, habitually or with the rarest exceptions naked, cross, smiling (with the wind, and not with joy), exclusively confined to a milk-diet-rather than have grown to what I have become. Where are the comforts of my youth? the warm soft sponges which were wont to dab me daintily, the scented powders which were scattered over my then respected person, the bottles with soothing liquids that welled through the softest channels to my toothless but far from unappreciating gums. 'Whither are they fled, the glory and the dream?' Where are now the gorgeous habiliments in which, upon festive days, I was then arrayed?the Brussels lace, the bishop's lawn, the lily train which kept my baby legs so delicately snug, so decently concealed, the embroidered cap, the endless folds of flannel. Where are the troops of younglady friends who were once so eager to dandle, to caress me, to lay their soft fair cheeks to mine as they replaced me in my couch after these endearments? Did I sob?-they kissed me; did I yell? --and I did hollo a bit sometimes, I flatter myself they kissed me; did I crow?-which was my infant method of expressing satisfaction-they kissed me all the same. My career was, in a word, luxurious, but, alas! it was but brief. Another reigneth in my stead, and I am denominated now, with bitter disrespect, the Old Baby. The late lord mayor, sunk to a nameless alderman; the ex-minister of state, with nothing to give, and despised by every patriot; the last year's Bradshaw's Railway Guide; the shoes which one has grown out of, and that through the upper leathers; the type of all things that have seen their day, and will never see another-the Old Baby! Is it, then, a sin to be old? Is it wrong to have hair, to be of a flesh-colour, to cease to stare like a 'Darling, warling; did it dribble then? Dribbley ibbley, dribbley ibbley, dribbley ibbley: tum and look out at the window pindow, and see the red soldiers go by on their gee-gees: ook at the gee-gees! Did they frighten it? (pathetically.) Was it then? Naughty soldiers, naughty paughty; they shall be popped (with vivacity), popped, popped. Was he hungry, and would he have his dindin (two courses of milk, over the second of which I used to get uncommonly drowsy); dindin, dindin (singing), wrap him in a rabbit-skin; baby go to byby, byby, byby.' Thus was I wont to be apostrophised in my earlier days. Gorgeous spectacles, always of a novel charfood was administered to me, if I did but open my mouth; sleep stole upon me, to the accompaniment of slow music and soft Lydian (or other) airs, and, in particular, with a delicious sideways motion which I miss now extremely. It is remarkable how, as we grow older, we lose not only the pleasures themselves, the innocent pleasures of our youth, but even the capacity for enjoying them. It is sad to reflect, for instance, that that rocking of the human frame, which to the tune of 'Hushy pushy, Baby Bunting,' was once so soothing to it, produces, when attempted at a later period, a feeling akin to sea-sickness! The same venerable female visitors who were wont to call so often about luncheon-time, and at whose arrival I was at once equipped in my most splendid attire, call now-but it is to see the Other, the new arrival; a most grasping_and pugnacious babe, with no nose at all, so far as I can see, and a face, indeed, altogether, which, if it were mine, I should be downright ashamed to let people look at. And yet to hear them talk! 'Oh, what a bew-w-tiful baby! What a char-rming baby! Only six weeks old! Is it possible, nurse? What notice it takes! [This is when it shrieks with terror and bad temper.] What an eye it has! [This is very true; its left eye is always at the western angle of the lid, trying, as it seems to me, to discover a passage under its blob of a nose, by which it may join the other one.] What a duck of a mouth! [It's much more like an oyster.] I suppose its nose will get all right in time. [Ha, ha!] It's rather small at present, is it not? [Rather.] What a chin! [They might just as well say: "What a couple of chins!" for there are two of them. One of the foolish women perhaps lays down her parasol, and offers to take up the little wretch, who resists franticly.] Won't it come to its? Never mind, then, my loveliest one! [Oh, to see its wrinkled, crabbed, screaming, variegated countenance, at the moment when this epithet is conferred upon it!] Frightened at the bonnetty ponnetty, was it not? Now then; now she has taken her bonnet off, now it will come to its Margery Pargery! Lor bless me, nurse, if it does not think that I am its mamma! Now, isn't that strange?' And if the reader could see Miss Margaret Crabapple, he would think it strange too. It may require some wisdom in a child to know its own papa; but not to know one's own mother is, in my humble opinion, little short of idiotic. Yet I remember when I was young myself—that is to say, |