of all opposition and by-play to the end,
everything will be worse than ever, as it was fifteen
years ago, when the " system" was last fully
exposed in Household Words.* King Rusty
is too dogged and sullen to take a hint and be
quiet. He will understand nothing but
deposition. He will never abdicate; he must be
dethroned. What we desire to know is no
impossible or unreasonable thing. It is merely
this: Who are the people who rule us? what
are their powers and attributes? Are they the
midges in office, or the responsible advisers of
the Crown? and how far does their authority
agree with the principles of our Constitution
and our Laws?

* See HER MAJESTY'S SERVICE, vol. viii., pages
433 and 523; and HER MAJESTY'S CONSULAR SERVICE,
vol. ix. page 482.

WORDBOROUGH MINT.

THE English, said Voltaire, gain two hours a
day in talking, because they eat half their words.
We are not greater gluttons than our neighbours
in that sort of diet, but we do save time.
We save it, not because we swallow syllables and
syllabubs with equal relish, but by paring and
pruning. We are not omni-vorous when we cut
away the first two syllables of omnibus, and save
time by the use of a word in three letters instead
of seven. Gentlemen and ladies of a precise classical
turn still consume time by saying omnibus;
and an over-classical member of parliament will
go down to posterity as the gentleman who
talked about "two omnibi," forgetting that if
he will stickle for his Eton Latin grammar he
must take omnibus for what it is already, a
plural form of the word omnis—all; meaning
"for all," and so indicating the desire of its
inventors to provide a vehicle in which people
of all ranks might agree to sit together, and
solve one of the problems set them by the
growth of London. And so they do. Since
the Canterbury Pilgrims, never did groups of
people so diverse in rank make the same journey
together upon equal terms, till busses came to
be an institution. Chaucer gone, the world
waited for Shillibeer. In the eye of the
conductor, my lord, his lackey, my lady, and her
milliner's apprentice, are alike from the moment
they become his fares. Within the omnibus a
philosophical republic is established, with the
conductor for its president. Is it a sense of
this dignity in his position, as one who cares no
more than Charon to distinguish, among fares,
and who would not set a higher value than threepence,
between Camden-town and Tottenham-
court-road, upon Aristotle or Alexander the
Great—is it our sense of this philosophic dignity
that has saved the conductor from all clipping
of his title? If omnibus be bus, why not call
the conductor duck? Hailing the duck to get a
buss might sound like a forward proceeding.
But what of that? The whole desire is to get
forward—to be a little fast. Talking of duck
suggests that there is, after all, one open joint
in the conductor's philosophic armour, and that
near his heart. He cares less for men than for
women. But here, again, he has a sublime
disdain for mere surface particulars. " Sylvia the
fair in the bloom of fifteen," or any " wrinkled
hag with age grown double," would equally
impel him to ask Pompey the Great himself to
"ride outside to oblige a lady." Whatever the
reason, this impassive man has a title that
might be given to Death itself, The Conductor,
and no mortal has ventured to contract it. Not
even into the dissyllable, ducky. Yet when
we chop three joints from the word cabriolet,
and call that vehicle a cab, we call the driver
thereof cabby. This way of economising speech
was discussed by Addison in one of his papers
for the Spectator, where, in the character of a
silent gentleman, he rejoiced in the objection of
his countrymen to waste of words. When we
are obliged to utter our thoughts, we do it, he
said, in the shortest way we are able; our
language abounds in monosyllables which enable
us to express thought in few sounds; where the
words are not monosyllables, we often make
them so, as much as lies in our power, by
rapidity of pronunciation. We have left off
sounding ed as a syllable in words like lovëd,
except at church, where saving of time is not an
object. We say can't and won't for cannot and
will not, and save breath even at the expense of
whoms and whiches. The abbreviation of mobile
or mobility, as the name of the fickle populace,
into mob was commented on by Swift as well
as Addison. Dryden wrote " mobile." Says
the Mufti in Don Sebastian, " 'Tis a laudable
commotion. The voice of the Mobile is the voice
of Heaven." But mob is now lawful and accepted
currency as a complete English word; and so
is cab; and so is bus becoming. When the
Times newspaper was established in January,
seventeen 'eighty-five, the name given to it by
its godfather was "The Daily Universal Register;"
but this name being long, and allowing
great latitude to the taste of the trade and of the
public, was broken up into so many odd little
bits, that on the first of January, seventeen
'eighty-eight, it appeared under the new name of
"The Times," which, its proprietor announced,
"being a monosyllable, bids defiance to
corruptors and mutilators of the language."

The omnibus we have got upon is evidently
taking us through Wordborough, down the old
Etymology Road, in the direction of the Mint
and the Exchange. So be it. There is no reason
why we should not pay a visit to the Mint, see
a few words coined, and take a turn on 'Change,
where we may observe how the coin is trafficked
with.

Everybody knows that—except phrases
adopted by successive generations from popular
plays and songs, and retained, when their origin
has become unknown to those who continue in
the use of them—a great part of the familiar
speech of the untaught is coin of the most
ancient stamp. Thus " going the whole hog"
—" the whole hog or none"—which bears the