116 Select Vestries: [ Aveusrs 
Founded, then, on principles proved, even to the demonstration of an 
axiom, to be vicious, select vestries of the class we have just described 
bear in their very establishment the sentence of their condemnation. 
With the development of those principles, we might here, therefore, close 
our case against them ; but, beside that the evidence is too entertaining 
to be lost, the subject is of such importance that we proceed to point out 
some of the most prominent evils to which the system is exposed. 
These may almost all be comprised in extravagance in the expenditure 
of the parish funds. Select vestrymen will doubtless dispute in what 
extravagance consists. We deem it, therefore, necessary to state that by 
extravagance we here mean the incurring of a single expense unwar- 
ranted by the strictest necesssity, and the payment for a single article 
of one solitary shilling more than the sum at which the most unlimited 
competition has proved that it can be obtained. This is just, however, 
the very extravagance to which bodies constituted like select vestries 
are peculiarly exposed. From an almost unlimited command of funds 
(their own contribution to which is too small in relation to the aggregate 
to operate as a check), their whole expenditure is necessarily placed on 
the most lavish scale. But the members of corporations, be the descrip- 
tion what it may, always fall into the most exaggerated notions of their own 
magnificence, and regulate, in consistence with this estimate, the whole scale 
of their expenditure. Corporation expenses, of course, we allude to—for the 
corporative and private expenses of the members of corporations are twa 
very different things. In corporation expenditure, however, is frequently 
involved the promotion of the personal comfort of the members. This 
may be more or less direct, according to circumstances. Thus, if a Lon- 
don tradesman slip into an alderman’s gown, and have to visit Greenwich 
on any such corporation business as that of eating white bait at the Ship, 
it is manifest that his comfort would be directly promoted by exchang- 
ing his quondam place on the outside of the Greenwich stage for a seat 
in some gilded civic barge. It is almost as obvious that his comfort 
would be remotely increased by his having to perform his Sunday devo- 
tions in a splendid church, decorated with altar-pieces, carvings, cloths 
of crimson, and all the et cetera of magnificence, rather than having to 
squat himself down in some plain, unadorned, meeting-house-lookin 
kind of a chapel, where the seats were all hard, and the prayer-books 
thumbed. It may be pretty well imagined that, in either case, with the 
requisite command of the funds, he would not be long in obtaining that 
which he would think no more than justly due to his dignity ; and, 
even supposing him destitute of the usual quantity of selfishness, the 
latter is an expense into which a thousand other considerations might 
conspire to prompt him. As it is with other corporations, so is it 
with select vestrymen ; and as we may assume that the infinitely greater 
proportion of all the various expenses to which these principles would 
give rise would be unwarranted by the occasion, the institution of select 
vestries, by multiplying the subjects of expense, affords a direct encou- 
ragement to extravagance. Now we do not know what may be the pre- 
cise connecting link between vestry-feasting and church-jobbing; but, 
somehow or other, these are two subjects of expense in which the select 
have always shone most conspicuous. It appears, from a paper contain- 
ing a statement of some of the earlier abuses of the select vestries of St. 
Martin’s, St. Ann’s, and St. Clement’s, “ that they went in pursuit of a 
wretched shoe-cleaner, by whom some miserable woman was illegitimately 
pregnant, for fear the woman and child should become chargeable to the 
. 
