Punch (58.1870)

106

PUNCH, OK THE LONDON CHARIVAEI.

[March 12, 1870.

AWKWARD !

Literal Servant Girl {to Brown, who was calling for the first time on the Dibsworths). " Please, Sie, tour Cabman say he don't halt1

like the Look of this here Half-Crown you've give him !! "

OUE OWN MUD IN OUR OWN MOUTHS.

Our candle manufacturers complain that they can't live because
their raw material has run up to such a figure. And their raw material
has risen in price because it is wanted for making butter. It is a sober
fact. It was but the other day that chemistry taught our manufac-
turers to consolidate and refine all sorts of oils and greases into the raw
material of candles. And now science has gone a step farther, and
taught us how to turn that, which has but just been made to take
form and pressure as dips and moulds, into "prime Irish" and "best,
Dorset! " No wonder stearine is going up : fatty matters rising to
the surface. Everything with grease in it is worth putting under
process. Science will compel its precious oils, and extort its fatness.
But the last discovery, in this direction, is the grandest. It beats
what we had hitherto regarded as the triumph of industrial chemistry—
the extraction of Champagne out of petroleum. They have actually
found out how to turn Thames mud from Battersea reach into butter!
And so the whirligig of time brings about its revenges! We refused
to transmute our London sewage into milk on the Maplin sands,
through the purifying stages of rye-grass and mangold, and, lo, our
sewage, in payment of our stupidityyis coming back to us, via the
Thames, in all its naked nastiness, as butter!

It is only fair of Father Thames. We poisoned him, and he means
to do his best to poison us ; or, to put it more pleasantly, we turned our
fatness into pollution of his bed, and he is giving us back our filth in
fatness, whether we will or no!

Here is a triumph for Thwaites, a chance for the Board of Works,
a use for the deposits of Barking, a way of turning to account the
hundreds of thousands of tons of sewage now poured weekly from the
pumps at Abbey Mills. At present they accumulate as Thames mud,
and are complained of as a nuisance. You have but to turn that
Thames mud into butter, to extract from it a bonus and a blessing!
Write up over the Abbey Mills pumping station " Bazaxgette,
Butterman to the Board of Works ! " and let Thwaites and the
Board bind themselves to use their own extract as " the best sub-
stitute for butter at breakfast! " And in honour of that reach of

Thames where was made the first find of this choice delicacy for the
breakfast table, let Batter-sea be re-christened and known henceforth

as Butter-mere.

"AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?"

Improving this text, the Echo is eloquent on the cold-blooded selfish
ness and cowardly inhumanity of the men who, the other day, stood b;
and saw a drunken double-murderer at Brentwood cut his wife's throa
first and his own afterwards. Another case of the same kind is that o
Patrick Jennings, a Black Country ruffian, who beat out with a hal
brick the little life he had not first jumped out of his wife's body with
his iron-clamped boots, in the sight of several men,

" "Who didn't think it was their business to interfere, as it was only hia
own wife he was punching."

The Echo wonders how human beings could look on at such act:
of murderous brutality without even lifting a hand. Where's the
wonder? They are only bettering the instruction of their superiors
What is it but the doctrine of Non-intervention transferred from
public to private life ?

In the face of this sickening story, can we wonder that Bishop
Selwxn has thought it advisable to bring over, as his suffragan, a
clergyman who was of old his right hand in dealing with the
natives of New Zealand ? All Bishop Selwyn's and Dr. Arraham's
united experience of savagery will not be too much for the work they
have before them in the Black Country.

At 7'30.

What terrific sensation will the theatres next bring out ? One o
them now announces Twenty Minutes with a Tiger! This beats the
Bull-fights.____

The Gas-Fitter's Paradise.—Berners Street.