Everybody is beginning to draw in to meet the necessity for pulling out.
Tradesmen are reducing their expenses in all directions, and a
respectable grocer has just dismissed an assistant who suited him to a
T. A cook-shop boy, who used to be kept purposely to carry out the
provisions to the customers, has been sent away, in order to enable the
proprietor to carry out the provisions of the income tax. A large
linendrapery house in the Westminster Road has cut off "a young man,"
who is thus thrown, as it were, as a burden on the rest of the
community.
Individuals in a respectable sphere of life, who could formerly keep a
page, have been obliged to turn over a new leaf; and it is a positive
fact that a Conservative peer intends, in the ensuing Session, putting
down a Brougham.
But it is not only among old and established interests that the burden
will be felt, for it is ascertained beyond doubt that the boys will be
alarming sufferers. The toffey dealers have already commenced
manufacturing an inferior article, which is being palmed off upon the
juveniles as the genuine Everton. We have personally analysed a piece of
Albert rock, under the new system, and we have discovered an increased
proportion of sand in its composition. It is also a lamentable fact that
a baked potato man has stopped up—we hope not permanently—one of the
chimneys of his apparatus, besides extinguishing one of the fine
lanterns with which it is adorned—a piece of retrenchment that will fall
first on the oilman, and ultimately on the whale-fishing interests.
An influential publican has shockingly reduced his only potboy, and the
unhappy lad is walking about the streets on a salary four _per cent._
under that of last year—a miserable victim to the income-tax, and a
martyr (of course) to Tory ascendancy.
Respectable families, who never before considered the matter worth a
thought, are looking narrowly to the candle-ends, giving, it is true, a
momentary impulse to the trade in save-alls, but the flush is feverish,
and will, of course, be followed by depression. The perquisites thus
lost, by a stoppage in the kitchen-stuff commerce, can only be made up
by the servants taking it out of their masters' bones, which used
formerly to be abandoned to the grubbers, who must in future look for
grub in some other direction.
The penny-a-liners have also been lowered, in order to enable some of
the newspaper proprietors to pay the income-tax, but it is expected this
reduction will be counterbalanced by the increase in the number of cases
of real distress, and the other raw articles which form the staple of
paragraphs.