In the border-line districts, where the fiercest conflicts took place, the inhabitants sided with one or other of the contending parties. Some noted with delight the humbled tone of the old arbitrary monopolists, and heartily backed the invaders. Some old-stagers stuck to the ancient companies, and to the faces of familiar turncocks. These paid; but many shrewd fellows put off the obsequious collectors, and contrived to live water-rate free. Thus the honest, as usual, paid for the knaves; and the ultimate burden of all these squandered resources fell--also as usual--on society at large. 'Such a state of things could not last; and it came to a conclusion which experience, had it been invoked, might have led parliament to anticipate. For, scarcely a century before, the two chartered East India Companies, after five years' internecine war, had coalesced to form that gigantic confederacy which for years monopolised the Indian trade, and rose to an unexampled pitch of corporate power and aggrandisement, at the cost of the mercantile community. 'Just so, in 1817, the great water-companies coalesced against the public, and coolly portioned out London between them. Their treatment, on this occasion, of the tenants so lately flattered and cajoled, will never be effaced from the public memory. Batches of customers were handed over by one water-company to another, not merely without their consent, but without even the civility of a notice. Old tenants of the New River Company, who had taken their water for years, and had been their thick-and-thin supporters through the battle, found themselves ungratefully turned over, without previous explanation, to drink the "puddle" supplied by the Grand Junction Company. The abated rates were immediately raised, not merely to the former amount, but to charges from 25 to 400 per cent. more than they had been before the competition. The solemnly-promised high service was suppressed, or made the pretext for a heavy extra charge. Many people had to regret "selling their force-pumps as old lead," or fixing water-closets on their upper floors, on the faith of these treacherous contractors. Those who had fitted up their houses with pipes, in reliance on the guarantee of _unintermitting pressure_, found themselves obliged either to sacrifice the first outlay, or to expend on cisterns and their appendages further sums, varying from L.10 or L.20 up to L.50--and even, in many cases, L.100. When tenants thus unhandsomely dealt by expressed their indignation, and demanded redress, they were "jocosely" reminded by smiling secretaries that the competition was over, and that those who were dissatisfied with the companies' supplies were quite at liberty to set up pumps of their own.