is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish?  What is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of 100,000 pounds seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish.  What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish?  What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?  What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish?  And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so.  That is internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress?  What was Poland to the Czar?  What Greece to the Turk?  What India to England?  What at last will Mexico be to the United States?  All Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?  What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?  What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?  What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?  What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?  And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

CHAPTER 90

Heads or Tails

“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” 
BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.

Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail.  A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder.  Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast—­and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty.  In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance-that happened within the last two years.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.  Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.  Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his.  By some writers this office is called a sinecure.  But not so.  Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them.