A STOP TO " HOPS."
WEDNESDAY was a doleful day, to Cockney Councillors, their spouses and progeny. The civic Parliament, pressed hard from without, submitted to the dire necessity of retrenchment in the funds of feasting. We have not had an opportunity of ascertain- ing the price of turtle since Wednesday, but of course it has fallen at least 50 per cent.; Madeira will lie in the docks a perfect drug, and punch be shunned like pollution. No wonder that the Council broke up in sulky sorrow. " The members," says the re- porter in the Morning Chronicle," moved out of Court evidently in a very melancholy condition." Melancholy they well might be, not only because of the ditninished dinners, which affected their own crea- ture comforts more especially, but also for the storm sure to burst upon them on their return home. We can fancy a worthy mem- ber of the Council alarming his wife and daughters with the rue- ful cast of his visage, not daring, until primed with port, to dis- close his cause of grief, while they ire suspecting a fall in the Stocks, a failure in the City, or the e leek of ship and cargo "un- derwritten" by " Figgins. At length Cie horrible truth is told : —" There's to be no more 'ops ! The Court has put down the summer excursions !"---- " Then came at once the lightning and the thunder !"
To describe the rage of the female Fig,einses, is beyond our power. To have curtailed the expenditure in guzzling and gormandizing, was all right and proper. Men have no business to leave their families two or three days in the week, and, under the pretence of looking after the London Bridge Approaches, or the Sewers and Lamps, consume hour after hour at low tavern feeds: but the " hops" were so genteel, and refined, and sentimental ! In the " summer excursions" the wives and daughters of the civic aristocracy had an opportunity of enjoyment at the public ex- pense. Nobody could object to any thing so harmless and roman- tic as a jaunt to Putney by water. But the allowance for these innocent and praiseworthy recreations etas entirely abolished; while, with unmitigated selfishness, the Court voted considerable though reduced stuns for the continuance of their own Com- mittee-dinners. Such, we doubt not, is a fair specimen of what many an unhappy member of the Coeunon Coe eeil has had to endure from his wife and daughters, as a pee:shment :se Wednes- day's proceedings. Let the ladies, however, take comfort from the reflection, that the time cannot be far distant when Corporation Committee-din- ners in London will share the same fate as the " summer excur- sions." The reluctant and long-deferred reduction in the expendi- ture, submitted to on Wednesday, will not and ought not to satisfy the heavily-taxed citizens. The allowances to the Committees are preposterous. One would suppose that the actual manage- ment of the property and finances of the City devolved upon the Committees; though there are officers of every description, sii,h large salaries, appointed to do the work. There are Auditors, Comptrollers, Chamberlains, Surveyors, Treasurers, Solicitors, and how many more we cannot tell, on whom the real business falls. We are convinced that there is not the least necessity for any Committee allowances; and that if they were entirely dune away with to-morrow, there would be no more difficulty in London than in Leeds or Liverpool, in finding trustworthy, re- putable, and clever men, to manage municipal affairs. When a real reform is effected in the London CorporatiA,n, the ladies will have their revenge for the loss of their " hops."
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