This here measure sets out at a sort of full gallop, which is nothing
more nor less than furious driving against us poor cabmen, by saying
that it is "Enacted by the QUEEN'S most Excellent Majesty,"--which I
don't deny that she is--and "with the advice and consent of the Lords
Spiritual"--(them's the bishops: which I should like to know who ever
seed a bishop in a cab, or on a 'bus, and therefore what have they to do
with it?). The Act has twenty-two clauses; and every clause is intended
to stick it into us. I shall take them clauses one by one, and if I use
a little more license than the Commissioners like, they must recollect
they makes us pay precious dear for our license, so we may as well have
our say for our money.
1. Everybody who wants a license must apply in writing; so, if a poor
unfortnate feller can't comply with the letter of the law by writing a
letter which he never learnt to do, he must take to thieving, or
something else, for he mustn't keep no cab, nor nothing.
2. The Commissioners is to have power to inspect your wehicles and your
cattle whenever they like, so that when your 'bus is full and your
passengers in a hurry to go by the train, you may all be pulled up while
SIR RICHARD turns over the cushions, and sees if you've got any broken
windows in your 'bus, or any broken winder drawin' of it. Of course
nothin' will be good enough, unless we have velvet hottermans to keep
the insides warm, and downy cushions for the outsides, as if we wasn't
downy enough already. As to the horses, I don't know where we are to get
'em good enough. Praps they'll expect us to buy all the Derby winners
and them sort of cattle to do our opposition work with. But I suppose
there'll be a grant of money next year from the public purse, for
private speckelation won't make it pay anyhow.
3. Purwides that, if we don't keep hansom private carriages for the
public, and first-rate cattle to draw four on 'em about at
three-halfpence a mile a-piece, we are to be fined three pounds a day,
and go to prison a month for every day; so that, if we've done it for a
whole year, we may be fined upards of a thousand pound, and be locked up
for about five-and-thirty years. Consekwently three years would give us
a hundred and five years imprisonment.
4. This takes all the crummy part of the bread out of our mouths by
reducing our fares to sixpence a mile, which it used to be eightpence,
which meant a shilling. Never mind! We'll get it out of 'em somehow, for
we may charge twopence a package for luggage that won't go inside the
cab; and we'll take care nothin' shall go in, for we'll have the doors
so narrow that we can't be made to open our doors to imposition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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