this man only, can be really said to know how
to drink a glass of wine. Let us return to the
vats.

The '50 Port having been satisfactorily
disposed of, the little party of which your Eye-
witness was one, moved on to other parts of the
vaults, and passed to a consideration of those
fine dry sherries and rich Madeiras in which the
inhabitants of our island especially revel— when
they can get them. At every stoppage for tasting
purposes, precisely the same ceremonial
gone through in connexion with the '50 Port,
took place— with the exception of the throwing
away the contents of the glasses— over
and over again. Your Eye-witness, however, was
prudence itself, and knowing that he had duties
to attend to after leaving the docks, confined
himself to one glass of Madeira (now raging in
his left great-toe) and another of a very curious
Amontillado called the Queen of Spain: a wine
calculated to reconcile one to that monarch in a
remarkable degree. Between all these sips, a
certain paper of biscuits, brought for the
purpose, was resorted to, to keep the mouth
in tasting order, and to prevent the fumes of
the wine from rising to the head. It was
perfectly successful in both these respects
— especially the last. How delightful is
temperance!

The recent cases which have been brought
before the public notice, in which it has been
tolerably evident that the wines left in the vaults
at the London Docks have been tampered with,
may have caused some of your readers to ask
how it is that the different wine-merchants in
London do not keep their stock in some
warehouse of their own, and under their own
supervision, in which case such frauds would be
impossible? The answer to this question is simple
enough. The wine has to be kept for years after
its arrival in this country, before it is required;
therefore, if the merchant were to pay the duty,
which he must if he wants to take his wine
away, he would be, during all these years, losing
the  interest of his money. While the wine
remains at the docks, it pays no duty,
consequently, during all the time that it lies there
going through its maturing process, the
possessor of it is able to keep his money, and make
use of it. Private bonded warehouses, where
the wine would be exempt from duty, are only
allowed within four hundred yards from the
river. The shipping expenses connected with
them are very heavy. There are few
merchants whose stock would be enough to fill one,
and of course if two or three took one of them
together, they would be liable to robbery from
each other's servants. There is little doubt but
that hereafter, when the duty is reduced to one
shilling or eighteenpence per gallon, instead of
five and ninepence, the merchants will keep
larger stocks of duty-paid wine than they do at
present, as the loss of the interest of the money
then would be inconsiderable in proportion to
the dock charges. These last are very high,
sixpence per week being required for every pipe
of wine that lies in the vaults. Some notion
may be formed of what these dock charges
amount to, in the course of the year, when it
is mentioned that the firm of Beeswing and
Crust, to whom the Eye-witness owes his
information, pays to the different dock companies
a sum varying from £12,000 to £14,000 per
annum.

It is a startling thing, and gives one some
notion of what commerce is in this country, to
visit such places as the London Docks, and see
the scale of everything around one. The entire
space enclosed within the domains of the
company is no less than 91 acres. Of this the
water area alone is 34½ acres, while the quay
room, alongside which vessels may lie, occupies
11,115 feet. The contents of the different
warehouses and sheds amount to 230,000 tons, and
there is vault accommodation for wines and
spirits capable of holding 87,000 pipes. It
remains to give the reader some notion of the
wealth contained in the different warehouses
and vaults; this may be done, not to frighten
the reader with figures, in but one or two
quotations. The estimated value of goods of various
kinds landed in the London Docks in one year
(1850) was thirteen million and a half of
sovereigns. The worth of the wines and spirits
landed in that year alone was close upon
three million; the rest was made up by the,
value of the tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee, and other
goods which entered the docks. Now let us
see what government gets out of all this. On
those wines and spirits, the estimated value of
which has just been given, a duty was at that
time exacted amounting to £4,253,977, which is
only nearly twice the worth of the goods
themselves, while on the whole contents of the
docks the excise reached the enormous sum
of £13,727,390. And this, let the reader
remember, was the amount of revenue gained
from only one of the numerous docks at which
excisable goods brought to this country are
landed.

The space occupied by the London Docks
seems larger than is required. Your Eye-
witness was struck with this, both in the vaults
dedicated to wine and, subsequently, in the
warerooms devoted to tobacco. The men
belonging to this latter department when
questioned what had become of the stores which
used to lie there, replied that they were " down
at the Vic," and, indeed, there is no reason to
doubt that the New Victoria Docks, for which
the abbreviation just quoted is the slang name,
must have done considerable injury to the Old
Docks. It is not impossible, as has been already
hinted, that a reduction of the duty on wines
will hurt them still more, and that they may
suffer by many of the results of that system of
substituting direct for indirect taxation which
seems to find favour in the eyes of our modern
financialists. In every great change somebody
goes to the wall, and what is play to one set of
people is death to others.

There is a good deal of waste, as it seems to
the observer from outside, in the different
departments of the docks. Not only is there a