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realise £73,177. According to the Report of the Chief
Officer for the year 1884, there were 2,289 fires in the Metro
polis during that period, of which 194 resulted in serious
damage, and 2,095 in slight damage, and 42 lives were lost.
The number of fires in 1866, the first year of the operations
of the present Metropolitan Fire Brigade, was 1,338, of which
326 were serious and 1,012 slight. It will thus be seen that
although the total number of fires has largely increased in
the interval, the proportion of conflagrations of a serious
nature has been reduced from 25 per cent. to 9 per cent.
Even in the "good old times" of the Stuarts, there were
men who were more anxious to drive a bargain than to
observe the strict rules of morality, as the following extract
from Pepys' Diary shows:—
4th December, 1608.—Mr. Pickering meets me at Smithfield, and J. and
W. Hewer, and a friend of his, a jockey, did go about to see several pairs
of horses for my coach; but it was late, and we agreed on none, but left
it to another time; but here I do see instances of a piece of craft and
cunning that I never dreamed of concerning the buying and choosing of
horses.
The keen observer of the present day could, no doubt, find,
without much difficulty, examples of craft and cunning in
horse dealing, and possibly in some other matters of
which honest Mr. Pepys never dreamed to the end of his life.
One thing is certain, that, notwithstanding (or perhaps in
consequence of) the general increase of wealth since that
period, there are now, as then, persons who are not over
scrupulous in the pursuit of riches, and it may fairly be
argued whether we have made such progress towards purity
of commercial and social morality as might have been
expected from the spread of education, the diffusion of knowledge,
the growth of civil and religious liberty, and the
increased means of communication between different parts of