LOCKS RUINED.
Cueem's lock has been picked, and also that of Braimah. When Gibraltar was taken, Spain could not have been more dismayed— when the Bastille Louis the Sixteenth—than many a merchant whose treasure had reposed within fortresses understood to be im- pregnable. Lockpicking, it seems, is an art which may be reckoned among the manly sports of the Americans ; they contend in it for prizes and the chief of that art, A. C. Hobbs by name, comes over like a knight-errant to challenge all lockmakers. Chubb ac- cepts, and Chubb finds his enchanted lock unavailing Bramah, Hindu deity, who distributes miraculous ironmongery to a British public, is -vanquished. The enchanted lance ofAstolfo was not more -victorious than Hobbs's master-key. Doubts exist as to his literal compliance with certain conditions ; but that he has un- locked the impregnable locks, honestly and in presence of honest intelligent men, is an historical foot.
England is not quite easy under the defeat. Hobbs has a lock of his own, and we see that a contemporary, desiring retaliation, challenges "some public-spirited burglar" to try his hand on the American patent lock. Meanwhile, Hobbs holds the double championship of lockmaking and lockpicking.
now a professional lockpicker mast envy this amateur ! Bar- rington's instruments for picking pockets were toys to Hobbs's in- vention. Many a young George Barnwell, who has sat near a Chubb longing to get at the inside, will feel a pang. of regret that Jae had not been so lucky as Hobbs ; forgetting how sndustrious that gentleman must have been. But as the satiated Alderman wept to see the hungry man "waste that blessed appetite on mutton,' so a hungry furpin may gnash his teeth to see a Hobbs waste those blessed keys on science. It is a question whether similarly Baconian industry might not brinec' the cognate sciences of pocketpicking, fore-cry, and smash- ing, to perfection. Pockets open to the public, bank-notes on de- mand at " only 5s. per hundred," sovereigns a discretion, would be delightful inventions—a brief feast for the ingenious few—'a revo- lution in society.
Certain events are signs of progress. The young of mammalia are endowed as to their stomachs with a secretion called rennet, which enables them to render milk fit for easy digestion ; but as they outgrow the sucking age, they lose that secretion. As ci- vilization draws man from forest and prairie, he loses that piercing and far-reaching sight which enables him to see the eye of a spar- row behind the trunk of an oak-tree below the horizon. It seems that the lock is decaying from amongst us : are eve then approach- ing a lockless state of society--a full-grown state of virtue—that golden age of " community " when locks will be needless ?
Seriously, if locks are so weak, we must try to find some substi- tute ; and it is not easy to .see how that can be done in a hurry. The best substitute for the lock on the safe is honesty in the heart: but it would take a good deal of training- to bring society up to the perfect point in that; and we cannot yet agree even to begin general education.
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