260 Supply of Water to the Metropolis. 



birth to this little manual. Its virtues have been recorded neither 

 by historian, philosopher, nor poet. It has never distinguished 

 itself by any extraordinary attachment to the human race. Instead 

 of bounding and springing, its position on the surface of the water 

 is stationary." Instead of being fleshy, its head is ligneous. Like 

 its namesake, it ingulphs immense portions of filth and garbage ; 

 but, so far is it from being esteemed a delicacy, that not only the 

 Duke of Norfolk, but more than seven thousand families, at the 

 court end of the town, have it constantly served into their houses. 



Allegory apart — " Dolphin," in the Joint-Stock vocabulary, is 

 the word used by certain conscientious gentlemen who exclusively 

 supply the metropolis with that pabulum of life — Water — to de- 

 signate the source or head, in the river, from whence they draw 

 the supply of the article in which they deal. To this Dolphin — 

 to this wooden-headed, dingy-coloured, ill-shapen, insidious engine 

 of destruction, fraught with more mischief to the inhabitants of 

 Westminster and its suburbs than the wooden horse of the Greeks to 

 the unfortunate citizens of Troy — ^to this box, more crammed with 

 the seeds of all kinds of diseases — '-'"macies et nova cohors febrium" — 

 than that of Pandora, I entreat the earnest attention of every man 

 who considers the Public Health an object of paramount regard. 



That, at a moment like the present, when both the Legislature 

 and the Government are endeavouring to unfetter the commerce 

 of the country, by removing oppressive prohibitions and inconve- 

 nient restrictions, and thereby giving greater facility and encou- 

 ragement to the skill, the capital, and the industry of the people 

 of England — that, at such a moment, there should exist, in the 

 very seat of that Government, a Monopoly of an element of nature, 

 cannot but be matter of just astonishment. 



There then follow some observations upon the penal laws 

 applicable to monopolists, and of the mischief which has re- 

 sulted from the well-known arrangement of the Water Compa- 

 nies; who, to prevent entire ruin, divided the supply of the 

 town into districts, each limiting its service within a line agreed 

 upon, and exchanging, with the others, the pipes beyond its 

 boundary. "Thus," says the Dolphin, " were the customers 

 counted out, and handed over by these jobbers in one of God's 

 choicest blessings, from one set of monopolists to another, like 

 so many negroes on a West-Indian estate, or so many head of 

 cattle at a fair." 



But we are principally anxious to call our readers' notice to 

 the factSj or supposed facts, developed by the author of this 

 pamphlet, and we shall adhere to his own arrangement of them; 

 remarking, by the way, that the most serious and grave accu- 



