ce impaired.
Capricious tenants amused themselves by changing from one main to
another, as they might taste this or that tap of beer. The more
credulous citizens, relying on the good faith of the "public
servants"--as these once powerful water-lords now humbly called
themselves--were simpletons enough, on the strength of their promises,
to abandon their wells, to sell off their force-pumps, and to erect
water-closets or baths in the upper storeys of their houses. In many
streets, there were three lines of pipes laid down, involving triple
leakage, triple interest on capital, triple administrative charges,
triple pumping and storage costs, and a triple army of turncocks--the
whole affording a less effective supply than would have resulted from
a single well-ordered service. In this desperate struggle vast sums of
money were sunk. The recently-established companies worked at a
ruinous loss; and such as kept up a show of prosperity were, in fact,
like the East London Company, paying dividends out of capital. The New
River Company's dividends went down from L.500 to L.23 per share per
annum. In the border-line districts, where the fiercest conflicts took
place, the inhabitants sided with one or other of the contending
parties. Some noted with delight the humbled tone of the old arbitrary
monopolists, and heartily backed the invaders. Some old-stagers stuck
to the ancient companies, and to the faces of familiar turncocks.
These paid; but many shrewd fellows put off the obsequious collectors,
and contrived to live water-rate free. Thus the honest, as usual, paid
for the knaves; and the ultimate burden of all these squandered
resources fell--also as usual--on society at large.

'Such a state of things could not last; and it came to a conclusion
which experience, had it been invoked, might have led parliament to
anticipate. For, scarcely a century before, the two chartered East
India Companies, after five years' internecine war, had coalesced to
form that gigantic confederacy which for years monopolised the Indian
trade, and rose to an unexampled pitch of corporate power and
aggrandisement, at the cost of the mercantile community.

'Just so, in 1817, the great water-companies coalesced against the
public, and coolly portioned out London between them. Their treatment,
on this occasion, of the tenants so lately flattered and cajoled, will
never be effaced from the public memory. Batches of customers were
handed over by one wate