These _un_common counsellors, your Professor Owens and fellows, will
contend that to tolerate these things in a civilised city, is to reduce
it to a worse condition than BRUCE found to prevail in ABYSSINIA. For
there (say they) the jackals and wild dogs came at night to devour the
offal; whereas, here there are no such natural scavengers, and quite as
savage customs. Further, they will demonstrate that nothing in Nature is
intended to be wasted, and that besides the waste which such abuses
occasion in the articles of health and life—main sources of the riches of
any community—they lead to a prodigious waste of changing matters, which
might, with proper preparation, and under scientific direction, be safely
applied to the increase of the fertility of the land. Thus (they argue)
does Nature ever avenge infractions of her beneficent laws, and so surely
as Man is determined to warp any of her blessings into curses, shall they
become curses, and shall he suffer heavily. But, this is cant. Just as
it is cant of the worst description to say to the London Corporation,
‘How can you exhibit to the people so plain a spectacle of dishonest
equivocation, as to claim the right of holding a market in the midst of
the great city, for one of your vested privileges, when you know that
when your last market holding charter was granted to you by King Charles
the First, Smithfield stood IN THE SUBURBS OF LONDON, and is in that very
charter so described in those five words?’—which is certainly true, but
has nothing to do with the question.
Now to the comparison, in these particulars of civilisation, between the
capital of England, and the capital of that frog-eating and wooden-shoe
wearing country, which the illustrious Common Councilman so sarcastically
settled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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