It is exceedingly strange that any body of men, pretending to advocate retrenchment in our finances, will so barefacedly and undisguisedly seize upon a large sum of money belonging, as they honorably admit, to a most over-taxed municipality, and squander it for the least profitable of animal passions. Three thousand dollars could be better expended in a monument or other testimonial of our Cable joy, than to be guzzled down by a bevy of hungry hounds, who would have claimed boon-companionship with Judas Iscariot to get an invitation to the Last Supper. If it be necessary to express our joy, why not do it in a rational manner, like men gifted with reason, and not guzzle and swill like beasts of the field? Still the invincible selfishness of our Aldermen demanded an Aldermanic banquet, whence a majority of our officials will in all probability be carried home on a shutter, if they do not succeed in procuring accommodations at the public expense in the Fifteenth Ward Station. Where better to end the bacchanalian revel? We had believed that, when the iniquity of the tea-room was suppressed, and the bevy of loafers who were wont to breakfast, dine and sup from the free lunch of our Municipal tea-room, the whole fabrick of guzzling would be cast down, so that every intelligent and reputable man would conceive it a species of larceny to dine at the expense of the poverty-stricken tax-payers. But that which is bred in the bone cannot come out from the skin, and this habit of dining is too deeply seated to be eradicated from these veterans at the public table. It would be a curious study for a statician to compute the amount of groceries, wet and dry, consumed by some of these well fed officials, and, when published, would afford a very instructive lesson in municipal economy. We will venture to say that Simeon Draper alone, in the course of his public services, has deemed it a part of his duty to consume edibles and drinkables to the extent at least of three thousand dollars. Here, then, is a question for disputation at the Institute that, if the official keep of one man costs such a sum, how much would it cost to support an army. ------------------------------------ ☞ God made man, and he rested; then he made woman and rested; then he invented the Beecher family and rested again, and then he created the Field family; and there, let us hope, we come to a full stop. Fish and Fowl.