individuals are afraid to stir. It is understood that the employers are afraid of their men: that the men are afraid of one another, and that the women are all frightened together. This is not like England,—bold England,—merry, true-hearted England. Let not the matter be left to the magistrates and the police, as if it were merely a police matter. If the plague appeared there, the citizens would not give their case over to the doctors, without exerting themselves for their own safety. Neither should they stand by now, when a moral plague is making them the pity of the world. It is for them to form their own concert, and choose their own methods: but let it not stand for ever in the history of our time, that Sheffield was, in the nineteenth century, a harbourage for assassins, from lack of energy in a hundred thousand of the inhabitants to drag them out to the light of day.
THE CATTLE SHOW.
ITS LAST YEAR IN BAKER STREET.
I wish I were a beast, with four legs I mean: I really think I should be a credit to my breeder; my appetite is very good, and I believe I have every requisite for growing stout, except a lack of conscience and an absence of mind. My mind, in my opinion, is too much or too little for me; there’s always something on it, and so there is on my conscience. It is not much, I dare say: but, such as it is, there it is always night and day, day and night; and it keeps me as thin as a lucifer-match. But if I were a beast, I think I could win a prize. No responsibility! What a relish that reflection would give to one’s swedes, and and what a sauce it would make for one’s mangel-wurzel! Then one’s hay would nourish one, and one’s mash would turn to solid flesh. To have a keeper to look after one, and nothing to do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and ruminate upon the passage of the last mouthful of fodder! After such a life, when one had grown such a monster of obesity as to be exhibited for the admiration and imitation of a world always ready to appreciate eating and drinking; as to be gazed upon with interest by the eyes of queens and empresses, royal highnesses and serene highnesses, their graces and their ladyships; as to be patted by a royal glove, poked by an imperial parasol, pressed by a grand-ducal thumb, tapped by a princely whip, and smacked maybe by the consecrated hand of an episcopal dignitary, to say nothing of pinches and punches and polite invitations to “kim up” on the part of unaristocratic bucols and butchers, how justly could one low forth “vixi,” and waddle contentedly to the shambles in the proud consciousness of being “prime meat!” And when one was dead and eaten, what a consolation it would be to one’s surviving relatives and friends to know that one had not over-eaten oneself for nothing, but had, at least, been exhibited if not found worthy of a gold medal at the Smithfield Club Cattle Show!
What a huge stride in civilisation was made when the Show was transferred from Goswell Street to Baker Street, now, in its turn, as we hear, to be supplanted. Then philanthropy and philozoy went hand in hand; the chances of apoplexy amongst the fattened beasts were materially diminished, and the chances which had hitherto been vouchsafed to the aristocracy of seeing what their dinners looked like when alive were materially increased. For people of fashionable habits could not go down to Goswell Street, whereas people of any habits can with advantage pay a visit to Baker Street. Some poor creatures of little worldly knowledge may suppose, when they hear of a cattle show being held at Baker Street Bazaar, that a practical exemplification is offered of the effects produced by a bull in a china shop; their idea of bazaars is confined to trinkets, and gimcracks, and toys, and spurious jewellery, and tea-services, and baby-linen, and cockatoos, and stale pastry, and two violins accompanying a cracked piano; but they are very much mistaken; the cattle are penned neither amongst the crockery-ware in the fancy bazaar, nor amongst the waxen celebrities at Madame Tussaud’s, but in what is at other times a carriage repository; though it must in fairness be admitted that every facility—nay, inducement—is offered for migrating at the rate of a shilling a-head (Room of Horrors sixpence extra) to Madame’s establishment from the cattle department. But I must do the British nation the justice to say that they are for the most part too appreciative of Nature to be lightly seduced into the regions of Art; that obese merit under any shape—from fattened children to fattened pigs—never appeals in vain to their sympathies; and that the living form of an over-fed ox is more pleasing in their sight than the waxen effigy of any—even the most brutal—murderer. I am bound therefore to confess that I saw few of those people, who had come to the show with hearts yearning towards animals which had meritoriously over-eaten themselves, so far forget propriety as to inspect a collection which is closely allied to High Art. And yet this was ungrateful. For, if any trust may be placed in the insinuations of hand-bills, you would have believed that the wax-work figures had been prepared expressly for the gratification of visitors to the Cattle Show; that if farmers and country gentlemen connected with the Smithfield Club went down to their graves without having seen the carriage of Napoleon, the life-like figure of Garibaldi, and the murderer’s shirt with the stains of blood upon it, they would have only themselves to blame. All these blessings had been magnanimously arranged for their peculiar benefit, at the ridiculously small charge of eighteen-pence, and if they refused to avail themselves of the exhibition which had been got up for them, the exhibitors washed their hands of all the terrible consequences. Indeed I had no idea until I went to the Show that every public establishment in London was conducted with a single eye to that great event. The proprietor of the public-house at the corner evidently considered it the great national festival, else why did he hoist the Union Jack? The omnibuses all ran to Baker Street; the conductors all took it for granted that you were going to the Cattle Show, and very reluctantly allowed you to descend elsewhere; and the cabmen, with ribands in their horses’ frontlets, were urgent to take you thither “for a