Household Words, No. 13, June 22, 1850 : $b A weekly journal
General
Household Words, No. 13, June 22, 1850 : $b A weekly journal
English literature -- Periodicals
we have met him out a-walking with the young lady to whom he is engaged,
and we have known him meet her again with her cousin, after the dispatch
of the Mails, and really conduct himself as if he were not particularly
exhausted or afflicted. Indeed, how _could_ he be so, on Lord Ashley’s
own showing? There is a Saturday before the Sunday. We are a people
indisposed, he says, to business on a Sunday. More than a million of
people are known, from their petitions, to be too scrupulous to hear of
such a thing. Few counting-houses or offices are ever opened on a
Sunday. The Merchants and Bankers write by Saturday night’s post. The
Sunday night’s post may be presumed to be chiefly limited to letters of
necessity and emergency. Lord Ashley’s whole case would break down, if
it were probable that the Post-Office Pariah had half as much
confinement on Sunday, as the He-Pariah who opens my Lord’s street-door
when any body knocks, or the She-Pariah who nurses my Lady’s baby.
If the London Post-Office be not opened on a Sunday, says Lord Ashley,
why should the Post-Offices of provincial towns be opened on a Sunday?
Precisely because the provincial towns are NOT London, we apprehend.
Because London is the great capital, mart, and business-centre of the
world; because in London there are hundreds of thousands of people,
young and old, away from their families and friends; because the
stoppage of the Monday’s Post Delivery in London would stop, for many
precious hours, the natural flow of the blood from every vein and artery
in the world to the heart of the world, and its return from the heart
through all those tributary channels. Because the broad difference
between London and every other place in England, necessitated this
distinction, and has perpetuated it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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