office with a gang of eighty-one men. Of course the
publicans are delighted. They have the whole trade in their own hands
again; but this must not be. The righteous feeling of the country must
be interposed between the publican and his victims--a body of
hard-working men are not to be forced into drunkenness and poverty and
crime merely that a few publicans may increase their ill-gotten gains.
Reason, morality, religion, all protest against such a damnable doctrine.
Almost immediately after the Act had ceased, the Rev. Mr. Sangar, the
rector of Shadwell, presided over a meeting of coal-whippers "because the
coal-whipped office was established in his parish, and because the
Coal-whippers' Act had put down drunkenness, prevented the exactions of
middlemen, induced morality, and benefited a large number of industrious
men." Meetings for a similar purpose are held almost every month. On
similar grounds we have taken up the case of the coal-whippers--and for
the same reasons we ask the aid of the charitable, and religious, and
humane. Especially do we ask the temperance societies of the metropolis
to interfere in this matter. Many of the coal-whippers are total
abstainers. Now that Mr. Gladstone's Act is obsolete, they have some of
them been forced back into the public-house. We must save them ere they
be lost for ever. The coal-whippers are in earnest in this matter. They
want very little. Simply a renewal of Mr. Gladstone's Act, with the
proviso that there shall be only one office. It was the absence of that
proviso that enabled interested parties to evade the provisions of the
Act to a certain extent. Surely this is no great boon for Parliament to
grant.

THE STOCK EXCHANGE.

This country, said the late Mr. Rothschild, is, in general, the bank of
the whole world. That distinguished capitalist never said a truer thing.
If Russia wants a railway, or Turkey an army, if Ohio would borrow cash,
or Timbuctoo build a railway, they all come to London. The English
stockholder is the richest and softest animal under the sun--as
repudiated foreign stocks and exploded joint-stock projects at home have
too frequently illustrated. When the unfortunate stockholder has in this
way invested his all, the result is at times very painful. The cause of
this is not always to be traced to "greenness," but to the desire to
derive large dividends or interest, without due regard to the security of
the investment. Not e