Titel: Everybody's Business Is Nobody's Business

von William Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, Henry Van Dyke, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Hope, Henry Fielding, Giraldus Cambrensis, Daniel Defoe, Grammaticus Saxo, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Hugh Lofting, Agatha Christie, Sinclair Lewis, Eugène Brieux, Upton Sinclair, Booth Tarkington, Sax Rohmer, Jack London, Anna Katharine Green, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Xenophon, Alexandre Dumas père, John William Draper, Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell, Bram Stoker, Honoré de Balzac, William Congreve, Louis de Rougemont, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Rolf Boldrewood, François Rabelais, Lysander Spooner, B. M. Bower, Henry Rider Haggard, William Hickling Prescott, Lafcadio Hearn, Robert Herrick, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Charles Babbage, Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, Frank L. Packard, George Meredith, John Merle Coulter, Irvin S. Cobb, Edwin Mims, John Tyndall, Various, Charles Darwin, Sidney Lanier, Henry Lawson, Niccolò Machiavelli, George W. 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Burgess, Mary Murdoch Mason, Auguste Groner, John Lawson, Emma Wolf, Theodore Dreiser, Roger Ascham, John Charles McNeill, Owen Meredith, L. Adams Beck, Rudyard Kipling, Alphonse Daudet, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Anthony Trollope, A. A. Milne, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, J. Fitzgerald Molloy, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexander Whyte, Jean-Henri Fabre, E. R. Punshon, Neltje Blanchan, Porter Lander MacClintock, William Darnall MacClintock, Ida Pfeiffer, Stanley John Weyman, Max Brand, Herman Melville, William Joseph Long, William Cotton, Dorothy Kilner, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Butler, A. C. Seward, Harold MacGrath, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William J. Kountz, Arthur B. Reeve, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Anatole France, William Blake, Elizabeth Davis Bancroft, Carl von Clausewitz, Gildas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Melvin Linwood Severy, E. H. Chapin, Sir Philip Sidney, John Buchan, fl. 796 Nennius, Aristotle, Jean Baptiste Racine, Ellen Robena Field, Mitzi Perdue, Richard M. Stallman, John Bunyan, Andy Adams, Gideon Wurdz, Sir Robert Naunton, Paul Hentzner, Dante Alighieri, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Aldous Huxley, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, C. S. Lewis, P. G. Wodehouse, ca. 1824-1874 George W. Sands, Frank Richard Stockton, Freeman Wills Crofts, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Avery Hopwood, Jeffery Farnol, August Niemann, Molière, J. Breckenridge Ellis, L. W. King, Eleanor Farjeon, Maurice Maeterlinck, Sir Samuel White Baker, Thomas De Quincey, Henry Adams, Chauncey M. Depew, William Wells Brown, William Hazlitt, Walter Hawkins

ISBN 978-3-7429-1986-1

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Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business, by Daniel Defoe

Transcribed from the 1889 George Bell & Sons edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS IS NOBODY’S BUSINESS

or,

PRIVATE ABUSES, PUBLIC GRIEVANCES:

EXEMPLIFIED

In the Pride, Insolence, and exorbitant Wages of our Women, Servants, Footmen, &c.

WITH

A Proposal for Amendment of the same; as also for clearing the Streets of those Vermin called Shoe-Cleaners, and substituting in their stead many Thousands of industrious Poor, now ready to starve. With divers other Hints of great Use to the Public.

Humbly submitted the Consideration of our Legislature, and the careful Perusal of all Masters and Mistresses of Families.

BY ANDREW MORETON, Esq.

The Fifth Edition, with the Addition of a Preface.

LONDON:

Printed for W. MEADOWS, in Cornhill; and sold by T. WARNER, at the Black Boy in Pater-Noster Row; A. DODD, without Temple Bar; and E. NUTT, at the Royal Exchange. 1725.

Price Six Pence.]

THE PREFACE

Since this little book appeared in print, it has had no less than three answers, and fresh attacks are daily expected from the powers of Grub-street; but should threescore antagonists more arise, unless they say more to the purpose than the forementioned, they shall not tempt me to reply.

Nor shall I engage in a paper war, but leave my book to answer for itself, having advanced nothing therein but evident truths, and incontestible matters of fact.

The general objection is against my style; I do not set up for an author, but write only to be understood, no matter how plain.

As my intentions are good, so have they had the good fortune to meet with approbation from the sober and substantial part of mankind; as for the vicious and vagabond, their ill-will is my ambition.

It is with uncommon satisfaction I see the magistracy begin to put the laws against vagabonds in force with the utmost vigour, a great many of those vermin, the japanners, having lately been taken up and sent to the several work-houses in and about this city; and indeed high time, for they grow every day more and more pernicious.

My project for putting watchmen under commissioners, will, I hope, be put in practice; for it is scarce safe to go by water unless you know your man.

As for the maid-servants, if I undervalue myself to take notice of them, as they are pleased to say, it is because they overvalue themselves so much they ought to be taken notice of.

This makes the guilty take my subject by the wrong end, but any impartial reader may find, I write not against servants, but bad servants; not against wages, but exorbitant wages, and am entirely of the poet’s opinion,

The good should meet with favour and applause,

The wicked be restrain’d by wholesome laws.

The reason why I did not publish this book till the end of the last sessions of parliament was, because I did not care to interfere with more momentous affairs; but leave it to the consideration of that august body during this recess, against the next sessions, when I shall exhibit another complaint against a growing abuse, for which I doubt not but to receive their approbation and the thanks of all honest men.

EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS IS NOBODY’S BUSINESS

This is a proverb so common in everybody’s mouth, that I wonder nobody has yet thought it worth while to draw proper inferences from it, and expose those little abuses, which, though they seem trifling, and as it were scarce worth consideration, yet, by insensible degrees, they may become of injurious consequence to the public; like some diseases, whose first symptoms are only trifling disorders, but by continuance and progression, their last periods terminate in the destruction of the whole human fabric.

In contradiction therefore to this general rule, and out of sincere love and well meaning to the public, give me leave to enumerate the abuses insensibly crept in among us, and the inconveniences daily arising from the insolence and intrigues of our servant-wenches, who, by their caballing together, have made their party so considerable, that everybody cries out against them; and yet, to verify the proverb, nobody has thought of, or at least proposed a remedy, although such an undertaking, mean as it seems to be, I hope will one day be thought worthy the consideration of our king, lords, and commons.