e in three years no less a number than
six hundred and forty-six thousand eight hundred and eight rats! which
will consume, day by day, as much food as sixty-four thousand six
hundred and eighty men; leaving eight rats to starve." This, it must be
admitted, is startling enough, but any one who has a cellar, or a
corn-bin, will be inclined to believe almost any tale, however strong,
or to applaud any abuse, however severe, which may be heaped upon that
convicted thief, Rat. Midnight burglaries, undetected by the new police,
sink into insignificance compared with the ravages of rats of the London
sewers, which steal and destroy more in one week, than the value of all
the robberies of plate that blaze away in the newspapers from year's end
to year's end. And yet the plunderers go on almost unmolested. They are
too knowing for traps, and arsenic seems to be more fatal to human, than
to quadrupedal victims. The French journals, the other day, described a
grand battue in the sewers of Paris, when thousands of rats were
captured and killed, and we heard of large sums cleared by the sale of
their skins--for these thieves go about like swell mobsmen--very well
clad. But the example of our French brethren was not imitated in the
modern Babylon. We neither spill blood on barricades above ground, nor
in sewers beneath it. So Mr. Rat still carries on his plunder with
impunity, to the great horror and indignation of good housewives in
general, and of the writer we have just referred to in particular.
Protection is with him no explanation of national distress. _He_ says it
is all owing to rats: "The farmers have been eaten out of house and
home; bread kept up to a starvation price, to the misery, poverty, and
crime of our manufacturing and agricultural population. Men seldom think
of rats, because they seldom see them; but are they less destructive
because they carry on their ravages in the dark? Certainly not."

In another place he declares "there is not a farmer in the British
dominions but would, if he at present had all the rats have deprived him
of within the last ten years, this moment declare himself a wealthy
man." If the real truth could be found out, it would be a safe
speculation to back the statements of the rat-hater against the
statistics of the Protectionists.

The question then suggests itself, what should be done to save this
waste--to stop the plunder--to banish the thieves? and we turn to the
little blue book for i