Volume 25 — GARE LA GAROTTE.

Our friend and contemporary the Sunday Times (whose zeal for the spread of Democracy, for the non-suppression of Betting Houses, and for the purification of the Turf and the Church, we gladly recognise), in commenting upon an excellent article in which the daily Times dissuades the charitable from encouraging street mendicancy, has the following startling remarks:—

"While on this part of the subject, we would suggest the impolicy of withholding from the metropolitan mendicants, whether impostors or not, the scanty means of support.... We would counsel the old ladies and gentlemen not to hold their hands, lest the sturdy vagabond, who now contents himself with extracting pence from their humanity by whining, should take to strangling them in the dark streets, as some members of the fraternity have lately done in Manchester."

Really, Mr. Punch, who believes that in his time he has done no bad service to the cause of real Democracy (by which he means a system for the benefit of the many and not of the few), begs to say that these utterances by the "Champion of Democracy," are more worthy of one of the ruined clients of the Sunday Times, the Betting House Keepers (who may now be properly termed vagabonds), than of a respectable journalist with his faculties in order. Threatening decent people with strangulation because they decline to assist imposture, is rather a strong argument. Luckily, there be things called Policemen.