Well! I repeat, I am not going to stand it. Tame submission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven. I croak the croak of revolt, and call upon the Happy Family to rally round me. You men have had it all your own way for a long time. _Now_, you shall hear a sentiment or two about yourselves. I find my last communication gone from the corner where I hid it. I rather suspect the magpie, but he says, ‘Upon his honor.’ If Mr. Rowland Hill has got it, he will do me justice—more justice than you have done him lately, or I am mistaken in my man. ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS. EGGS. There is a curious illustration of the mode in which kings and legislators thought to make things cheap, in an Ordinance of Edward the Second, of the year 1314, in which it is set forth that there is ‘an intolerable dearth, in these days, of oxen, cows, sheep, hogs, geese, capons, hens, chickens, pigeons, and eggs;’ and therefore, amongst other regulations, it is prescribed that twenty eggs shall be sold for a penny, and that the eggs should be forfeited if the salesman would not take that price. Some years before (1274), the Lord Mayor of London, in a similar proclamation, shows us how the commerce of food was conducted, by ordaining that no huckster of fowl should go out of the city to meet the country people coming in with their commodities, but buy in the city after three o’clock, when the great men and citizens had supplied themselves at the first hand. Of course, these regulations did produce ‘an intolerable dearth;’ and Edward the Second had the candour to acknowledge this by a proclamation of 1315, in which he says, ‘we have understood that such a proclamation, which at that time we believed would be for the profit of the people of our realm, redounds to their greater damage than profit.’ Nevertheless, two centuries and a half later, the civic wisdom discovered that ‘through the grievous covetousness of poulterers, the prices of all poultry wares are grown to be excessive and unreasonable;’ and therefore the Lord Mayor decrees the prices of geese and chickens, and commands that eggs shall be five a penny. (Stow.) In 1597 we learn, that even an attorney-general could not have the benefit of such an enforced cheapness; for the household book of Sir Edward Coke shows us that his steward expended 4_s._ 8_d._ in one week of May, for his master’s family in Holborn, by daily purchases of eggs at ten for a groat; while at his country house at Godwicke, in Norfolk, in the same year, he daily bought eggs at twenty a groat in July.