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employed all your geometry in reducing to its minimum this great load of
patronage. But my Contractor, a plodding trading kind of man, who, as
such, understands that vulgar science (saving all respect) vulgarly called
trap, still better, would find out, by the instinct natural to men of his class
the art of pushing that reduction just so far as it ought to be pushed, and
no farther. Officers and Governors, eo nomine, he would have none: and any
superflous clerk or over-looker, who might be found lurking in his establishment,
he would have much less tenderness for than your Gardener has for
the sow-thistles in your garden. The greatest part of the his science comes
to him in maxims from his grandmother: and amongst the foremost of
those maxims is that, which stigmatizes, as an unfrugal practice, the
keeping of more cats than will catch mice.
If under all these circumstances the Penitentiary-houses should
have been something of a bug bear, it will be the less to be wondered at,
when one considers the magnitude of the scale upon which this complicated
experiment was going to be made. I mentioned in round numbers
nine hundred, as the numer of convicts, that was going to be provisioned
for but 888 was the exact number mentioned in the Bill. —
Three eights "thus arranged a terrible shew!" But granting this
be the number likely to require provision of some kind or other, it sure
does not follow, that all that require it must necessarily be provided
for in this manner or in none. If the eight hundred and eighty
eight appear so formidable, gentlemen may strike off the hundreds, and
try whether the country will be ruined by an establishment inferior
that which an obscene ex-countryman of theirs is going to amuse himself wi
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