saddle this tax-ridden city with an additional tax of nearly one million of dollars, for the support of a paid fire department, and avert the possible contingency that some mushroom scoundrel may, at no remote day, haughtily dispense the curses of monarchy or unlimited despotism on the ruins of your country!

A paid fire department, composed of a limited number of hired mercenaries, could not protect this city so effectually as a voluntary system. It could be done in the cities of Europe, where the habitations are composed of bricks, granite, marble, and other substances impervious to fire, but not in New York, where almost every edifice is a pile of shavings, or combustible matter. Moreover, hired civilians are the same as hired soldiers. Both work for pay, and not for public utility and renown. But the volunteer firemen of New York are as zealous and courageous as the soldiers of the Revolution, while paid firemen would evince the slothfulness and cowardice of the British in that memorable contest. Any man contending for liberty, and his wife and children, can easily rend to fragments three cowardly mercenary combatants, and a volunteer fireman of New York, panting for deeds of valor, and the love and respect of his fellow men, can effect more than half a dozen paid lazzaroni, who go to their perilous task as slaves go to the field.

For years the press of New York has disgusted and insulted the firemen, by striving to make the people believe that the police were more efficient at fires than the firemen; and most of these puffs are written at Matsell’s and the Captains’ offices. We now begin to see the motive of this, which was two-fold. First, to make the police system popular with the people—and it has required an immense deal of puffing to make it even tolerable with the people. And, secondly, to prepare the people for another police organization in the form of a paid fire department. We shall not recur to the past, but will recur to the future files of the press, and we will venture the prediction that, ere many days, it will be publicly announced that poor Matsell has either broken his thigh at a fire, or had his coat burned entirely from his back, or that he has saved the lives of seventy-five policemen, by ordering them down stairs just as the fatal crash was about to come; or, fancying himself Chief Engineer, he has actually struck a general alarm, as in Forsyth street. Or it may be announced that Captains Brennan, Leonard, or some other daring policemen, have quenched a tolerably large conflagration before the firemen arrived; and that, at the same terrific fire, they saved the lives of several men, women, and children, at the imminent risk of losing their own valuable lives.

This base stuff, and these monstrous lies, which daily fill the columns of the Press, concocted by the Police Department as early and valuable news, may have rendered the Police Department a little more tolerable with the people, but, at the same time, it has created a breach and a deadly hatred between the policemen and the firemen that will not be effaced while the present race of editors shall exist. And if they would atone for the mischief they have thus created, and would have more friendly relations subsist between the Police and Fire Departments, the sooner they stop such disgusting nonsense the better for them, and for the city at large.

Stephen H. Branch.

May 14, 1854.

And now, firemen, be vigilant, or you are lost. You are surrounded by spies and internal foes, who talk in favor of the Volunteer System, and yet in ambush are toiling unceasingly against it. The Fire Department swarms with these hypocrites, who are mostly politicians, and employed to stab your Volunteer System by the chief robbers of the politicians, who desire to strangle the rights of the people, and rob and oppress them with taxation, through two such overshadowing political organizations as the Fire and Police Departments.

c7

Stephen H. Branch’s Alligator.

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1858.

LAMENTATIONS OF A GRAHAMITE.

At the advent of Homœopathy a physician said: “There, Branch, take one drop every hour, and if you feel a twitch in the arms, or fingers, or toes, describe your electric thrills as accurately as possible, and let me see your notes when we meet again.” The anticipated twitches in the far extremities alarmed us, lest our heart might get a slight twitch, and we be very suddenly twitched into the grim abode of withered skeletons. We were eating Graham bread at this time with Horace Greeley, in Barclay street, and averaged about eight loaves a day between us, exclusive of the mush and stewed apples. An allopathic physician had assured us that all our fat was gone, save a small chunk near the spleen, and Horace warned us to take no medicine, but to duck our carcase every day, which would soon bring to the surface all the indiscretions of early years, as he had long averaged two baths a day, which produced two hundred boils, of which only twenty-eight remained. So, on a winter’s morning, about five o’clock, we entered a little Egyptian mummy canvas perpendicular box, (before the introduction of the blessed Croton,) and hooked the canvas pine-frame door, and pulled the string, and down came the icy water. In our thrilling despair and unconsciousness, we grasped the string, like a drowning man a straw, and jerked and re-jerked it, until we broke the entire upper cistern arrangements, when down came ten hogsheads of rain water on our poor head, and washed away the mummy box, and us with it. After a Jonah scuffle, we crawled out of the box, and opened the bath-room door, and screamed fire, and murder, and sea-weed, and ran down stairs, with ten hogsheads of water at our heels. We ran into the kitchen, where the servants slept, who sprang from their beds, and ran into the street, and yelled, and aroused the neighbors,—and hens cackled, and cats mewed, and dogs barked, in all directions. We seized a tub and dashed up stairs against the overwhelming torrent, and found about forty lean Grahamites, up to their knees in water, and poor MacDonald Clarke and Horace Greeley among them, bailing for their lives, in their nocturnal mantles. Chairs, and books, and umbrellas, were floating on the bosom of the waters, and the scene resembled the devastation of Noah’s deluge, or the encampment of California miners, at the rise and desolation of the Sacramento and her tributary streams. The walls were soon re-plastered, and new carpets laid, and chaos and saturation departed. We partially recovered from the bathing concussion, but were slowly wasting, and approaching the Spirit land, when we consulted an allopathic physician, (who was an old friend of ours,) who told us that Graham bread and mush had diminished and nearly paralyzed our kidneys, and that we must drink gin or die. We told him that our Father was President of the Rhode Island State Temperance Society, and that we belonged to three Teetotal Societies, and was President of one, and Recording Secretary of another, and that we could not drink gin, although we might possibly go ginger pop, without violating the Constitution of either Society. The Doctor then said: “Well, Branch, give me both hands, and let me also embrace you most fervently, and even kiss you, as you will probably die in about three days, and I shall never see you again, until I come to your funeral. Good by, my good fellow, and may God bless you in the other world.” “Good Lord, Doctor, don’t go—but bring on your gin, and I’ll drink a gallon to begin with, and more if you say so. I’m not prepared to die, and dam the Temperance Societies, where life and death and decayed kidneys are involved.” He then went to the Astor House, and got a quart of