London, Volume 4
Knight, Charles
1843
XC.-Sketches of the History of Crime and Police in London.
XC.-Sketches of the History of Crime and Police in London.
| We observed in a former paper on sharps and flats,[n.225.1] that, dexterous and accomplished as are the followers of the several varieties of illegal industry in London, perhaps above those of any other community in the world, their genius had not, at least in modern times, shone with any remarkable lustre in the inventive line. Their favourite modes of entrapping their prey seem to be nearly the same in the present day as they were or years ago; coneys are still caught, if not with all the scientific formality and display described by Greene in the end of the century, yet substantially by the same process; impostors of many aspects then, as now, cheated charity with their artificial infirmities; sweeteners and ring-droppers, and other artists of that class, may have lost some of their old designations, but have forgotten none of their ingenious stratagems; pocket-picking in all its forms was practised as cleverly, and taught as elaborately, in the London of the times of Elizabeth and James as by the | |
226 | Jew Fagin and his boys in the novelist's striking revelation of the hidden real life of our own day.[n.226.1] But probably the reason of this is really the excellence of these old tricks and wiles-their perfect serviceableness for their purpose, and nice accordance with the principles of human nature, as proved by the wonderful success with which they continue to be employed after having been in use for so long a series of years. Innovation is not to be needlessly ventured upon in pocket-picking any more than in politics (which, indeed, with its income-taxes and other ingenious contrivances, may be said to be in the main only a more respectable kind of pocket-picking). Time, however, is continually innovating, in spite of us, in all things; and if we look back over a few generations, we shall find that, while all other things have been moving, sometimes forward, sometimes, perhaps, backward, the character of London roguery and crime has also undergone important changes, of which some may have merely followed the general progress or varying circumstances of society, but the most marked have been brought about by the improved methods that have been adopted for the repression of particular offences. |
The police of a state is, in reference to the lawless part of the population, what the army is against foreign enemies. In the case of both--in this and, probably, in all other countries--the old plan was to call upon every member of the community to take his turn in the service, which consequently had to be so regulated as that it should interfere as little as possible with each man's ordinary occupations. Thus, the landed proprietor took the field with his tenantry and their labourers after the seed was put into the ground, and might remain for a few months while the grain was germinating and ripening; but when it was ready to be cut down, the army necessarily broke up. Whatever conveniences or advantages in other respects this system may have had, it was very unfavourable to | |
227 | the efficiency of a military force, and accordingly it early gave place to the practice of having armies composed of soldiers who had no other business or profession, and lived upon the pay they received for their services. In the department of police this improvement was everywhere much longer in being adopted. In its most extended meaning the police of a country may comprehend the entire establishment for the administration and execution of the laws-from the parish constable up to the Lord Chancellor inclusive. In ancient times, in our own and every other country, the functionaries employed in this work were, with scarcely an exception, persons who were chiefly engaged in other occupations, or whose proper profession was not that of the law; the Chancellor and other superior judges were sometimes clergymen, sometimes soldiers; the inferior magistrates were, as for the most part they still are, country gentlemen, merchants, and others, having generally no particular qualification, beyond a little leisure, for the discharge of their magisterial functions; the constables were, and continued in most places to be till very lately, anybody who could be got to serve the office. Whatever reasons not apparent upon the surface there may be (and we do not assert that there are not such) for leaving the ordinary adminis. tration of the law in rural districts in the hands to which it has been long confided, it is certain that a most objectionable state of things was engendered in the altogether different circumstances of large towns by this arrangement. Fielding has given us, in his a glimpse of the country magistrate of his day, the middle of the last century, in the chapter in which Mrs. Honour is brought before Squire Western by his sister to have on her for her unguarded words in the dialogue with her fellow-chambermaid. When the squire, on the suggestion of his clerk, and his recollection of the unpleasant consequences of some former decisions, declined to send the girl to Mrs. Western, we are told, disputing his law,
the squire is made to rejoin; The situation of the dispenser of the law, at least, was entirely different. In London, where there was no game to protect, and little local influence to be acquired or maintained, the commission of the peace was without its chief natural or usual attractions; and the work of an acting magistrate was at the same time so much more laborious than in the country, that few were likely to undertake the office on any mere amateur principle. In these circumstances it could only follow that men would seek it in order to make a living out of it; and if that could not be done in way it would be done in another. Hence the Basket Justices and Trading Justices of those times. The basket justices appear to have actually received presents or bribes from the parties who came before them; game, poultry, and other contributions, were dropped into the baskets from which they took their name, or perhapswere brought to the court, decently covered over we may suppose, in such receptacles by the generous and disinterested donors. However the matter was managed, this was perhaps no worse a substitute for a salary than the other mode that succeeded it, of making a revenue out of the fees. To some of the fees the magistrate may have been legally entitled; but of those also that of right belonged to the clerk, by an arrangement between them, with |
228 | which of course nobody had any business to interfere, a share, and that probably in many cases the lion's share, might easily be made to find its way into the pockets of his worship on the bench. The London trading justice has been drawn by Fielding at full length in his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., of the Justices of the Peace for the liberty of , before whom the watchmen brought Booth and their other prisoners, was utterly without legal knowledge, but, that is to say, he made his own interest, wherever it was possible, the guiding principle of his decisions, and In the preface to his last work, his Fielding, who had himself, before his health broke down, officiated for a few years as a London police magistrate, says that of his predecessors used to boast that he had made a a-year of the place; but how this was done Fielding does not profess to understand. The prisoners that Mr. Thrasher had to deal with on that April morning being, as it would seem, every man and woman of them penniless and friendless, were all despatched to prison; after which --in the hope, no doubt, that the afternoon might produce a better harvest. But, wherever it could be done, the plan of the trading justice was to make the party charged find bail: this bailing was the main stay and instrument of his trade. Among the witnesses examined by the Committee of the appointed to inquire into the state of the police of the metropolis in was the famous officer, John Townsend; and his evidence is full of curious information, as well as richly characteristic, Townsend had then been an officer at for above and years;[n.228.1] his acquaintance with the police system, therefore, went back to the year , at which date the trading justices still flourished. says Townsend, The system, therefore, had been improved upon, and, we may say, carried to perfection, since Fielding's day. Yet it had not gone on without endeavours having been made to check it and put it down. The Police-bill that Townsend speaks of was the great measure of , which established new public offices for the different districts of the metropolis, each with magistrates; namely, those of , , , , Street, Shadwell, and ; forming the basis of the system that still exists. But daily petty sessions had been held at under the superintendence of paid magistrates for a good many years before this. Henry Fielding had no salary; but his half-brother, Sir John Fielding, |
229 | (he was knighted in ,) who succeeded him, we believe, had.[n.229.1] Sir John, who, although blind, was a most active and useful magistrate, presided at till his death in . says Townsend, Among the measures that were taken to give respectability to this bench was the following device, as recorded in the Chronicle of the for :--
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What effect this decoration had, or whether it had any, in diminishing crime, we have not found recorded. But although the absolute quantity of crime appears to have been little affected by any of the improvements which the system of police underwent in the course of the last century, some of the changes in the laws, or in the means and modes of carrying them into execution, which were adopted from time to time, operated at least to alter the character of the prevailing description of offences. Thus, the trade in the restoration of stolen property, carried on from about the year by the famous Jonathan Wild, through a clandestine confederacy with all the regular thieves, burglars, and highwaymen of the metropolis, whose depredations he prompted and directed, received some check by an Act of Parliament passed in , by which persons convicted of receiving or buying goods knowing them to have been stolen were made liable to transportation for years; and by another clause of which it was enacted, with a particular view to Wild's proceedings, that, whereas there were several persons who had secret acquaintance with felons, and who made it their business to help persons to their stolen goods, and by that means gained money from them, which was divided between them and the felons, whereby they greatly encouraged such offenders, any person taking money or reward under pretence or upon account of recovering goods that had been stolen, without apprehending the felon, and causing him to be brought to trial and giving evidence against him, should be guilty of felony; and, although Wild's ingenuity and audacity enabled him for some years longer to elude this new law, his conviction upon the last-mentioned clause, and execution in consequence at Tyburn on the , appears to have effectually broken up and put an end to the iniquitous system which he had invented, and carried on for a tine with such remarkable ability and success. Jonathan Wild really in sense merited the surname of the Great, bestowed upon him by Fielding, in whose History of him, although the incidents are fictitious, there is no exaggeration of his talents and courage, any more than of his unscrupulousness and destitution of all kind of moral principle. Publicly, or to the world in general, it is to be understood, Wild professed to be the most zealous of thief-catchers; to ordinary observation the good man's life | |
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and strength appeared to be spent in the pursuit and apprehension of felons, and his zeal for the punishment and extirpation of all kinds of lawlessness to be quite insatiable. At his trial he had a printed paper handed to the jury, entitled and containing the names of thirtyfive robbers, housebreakers, and returned convicts, whom he had been instrumental in getting hanged. And this statement was probably true enough: in the accounts of the trials at the for many years before it came to his own turn, he repeatedly appears as giving evidence on the side of the prosecution, and in many cases as having taken a leading part in the apprehension of the prisoner. Here, for instance, is a portion of his evidence on the trial of Butler Fox, indicted for a highway robbery in :-- The records of these trials are at once the most authentic memorials we have of Wild, and the relics that afford us the most lively picture of his insolent, domineering, dare-devil character. In another case--that of the trial of John James, Eaton, John the Grinder, and others, for a highway robbery--which came on in , he said, After some dialogue, Eaves |
231 | (who, after all, was probably in league with Wild, and had been accessory to his own apprehension) observed that he could make himself an evidence. Wild says he replied, And then he goes on:-- In these and other similar instances Wild is understood to have taken the course he did, either because the prisoner was not of his regular troop, or had broken loose from his allegiance, and attempted to do business on his own account; or sometimes probably because, on a consideration of all the circumstances, it was deemed politic to let the gallows have the man merely to preserve appearances. Of course, in carrying on this trade of blood, he was occasionally turned upon by his betrayed, maddened, and desperate victim; but, whenever this happened, his matchless effrontery bore down everything before it, as effectually as his energy, determination, and fearlessness had done in the previous stages of the affair. In another trial--that of persons indicted for several robberies in -he gave the following account of his proceedings:-- The husband of the woman, it appears, had actually been a party in of the robberies, though he now came forward to convict his associates, having been no doubt all along in league with Wild; and Blake (more famous under his other cognomen of Blueskin) also figured as King's evidence on this occasion, and frankly admitted that he had been out with the prisoners. They, the unlucky parties, who found themselves placed in the dock, while their associates were thus preferred to the witness-box, says the account of the trial, but they were all found guilty, and swung in company, a few days after. Jonathan, however, to do him justice, did not to their last moment altogether desert even those of his friends whom, in his bold and comprehensive views of the true policy of trade, he thus occasionally found it expedient to sacrifice for the general good of the concern. It came to Blueskin's turn to be tried for his life, convicted, and hanged, within years after this. |
232 | Wild was to have been an evidence against him; but a day or before the trial, when he went to pay a visit to his intended victim in the bail-dock, Blueskin suddenly drew a clasped penknife, and, falling upon Jonathan, cut his throat, though the blade was too blunt to do the work effectually. When the verdict was given, Blueskin addressed the Court as follows:-- This is the most characteristic anecdote we know of Jonathan Wild: it conveys the whole man. The sublime of cool assurance, and the mixture of the ludicrous and the horrible, were never carried farther. |
The reward of which Wild could not manage to make Jacobs bring was part of a system established by various Acts of Parliament, which assigned certain money payments to be made to persons apprehending and prosecuting to conviction highway-robbers, coiners, and various other sorts of delinquents. It amounted obviously to offering a premium for such evidence as would hang a man; and there can be no doubt that it operated in many cases to procure such evidence against persons not really guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. A great sensation was produced in by the detection of the practices of a confederacy of miscreants, who it was discovered had for nearly years been making a regular trade of charging innocent parties with crimes and prosecuting them to conviction and execution for the sake of the rewards. of the gang; Berry, Salmon, Macdonald, and Gahagan, Egan, were tried and found guilty of the facts charged in the indictment; but on the special verdict of the jury being brought before the judges, it was the unanimous opinion of their lordships that the said crimes did not fall within any statute by which they could be capitally punished-and the conviction consequently fell to the ground. The prisoners, however, were immediately indicted anew on a charge of conspiracy, and being found guilty were sentenced to be imprisoned in Newgate for the term of years, to be each of them during that time set twice in the pillory, and on being let out of jail to find sureties for their good behaviour for years. But the popular sense of justice was not altogether defrauded of its prey: when, on the , Macdonald and Berry were exposed in the pillory for the time in , near , they were so severely handled by the mob that they with difficulty escaped with their lives; and when, days after, the other were brought out to make a similar exhibition in the middle of Smithfield Rounds, says the history, It appeared that the plan usually followed by these villains was for of them to entice | |
233 | persons to join him in robbing an accomplice; a accomplice then, taking care that the should escape, apprehended the dupes, and, having his evidence supported by another of the gang who had managed to purchase some of the articles of which their confederate had allowed himself to be robbed, found no difficulty in convicting them and securing, the reward. But in some cases they appear to have gone the length of getting up a story of a highway-robbery or burglary which had never taken place even in appearance, and swearing away the lives of parties who were entirely innocent--if even that was really a more atrocious proceeding than to seduce an unhappy wretch to commit a crime and then to get him sent to the gallows for it. When they received their money, it seems, it was divided at an entertainment which went among them by the significant name of the . Incredible as it may be thought, it is insinuated that some magistrates, for the sake of the grist in the shape of fees which the bloody trade brought also to mill, knowingly patronised and encouraged these execrable proceedings; but what is unquestionable, and hardly less strange, is, that the mistaken legislation, which was found to be pregnant with so much mischief and iniquity, was allowed to remain unchanged, and in constant action, till another fearful revelation in our own day of the practices which it gave birth to and fostered again excited the public indignation and horror. In , years after the trial of the former thief-takers, Vaughan, the police-officer, and others were found guilty of the same offence, of inducing persons to commit burglaries that they might obtain the blood-money for their conviction. How long they had carried on this system, or how much farther they had gone than was actually proved-how many victims they had drawn into crime and then handed over to transportation or the scaffold--to what extent they had screened and promoted the commission of minor delinquencies by parties whom they had, as it were, in training for felonies that would yield the Parliamentary rewardwhether they had not in some cases sworn away wholly innocent lives-all this remains in darkness; but, having done what they did, we may be well assured that there was no inhuman wickedness they shrunk from upon which they thought they could venture with safety. Vaughan and his confederates were sentenced to years' imprisonment in Newgate--for the law, armed as it was with so many death penalties against every-day offences, was still powerless to punish more severely such rare and enormous crimes as theirs; but soon after the whole of this system of rewards was repealed and swept away. If this step had not been taken by Parliament, it would have'been difficult to have obtained the conviction of any person charged with a felony where the principal evidence, as often must be the case, was that of the officers of police by whom he had been apprehended. Juries would have smelt blood whenever such a witness presented himself. It is remarkable, however, how completely the former case of the same kind appears to have been forgotten while the public mind was occupied with that of Vaughan and his associates. There is no allusion to it either in the report presented next year () by the Committee of the on the Police of the Metropolis, the half of which is occupied with nor, we believe, throughout the voluminous body of evidence thereto appended. Among the witnesses examined by the Committee |
234 | was the late Sir Richard (then Mr.) Birnie, the well-known magistrate: upon being asked if he thought the case proved against Vaughan was of common occurrence, Mr. Birnie answered, and being further pressed to say if he did not think it probable that the same thing must have happened in many other instances which had escaped detection, he replied again, with the same resolute ignorance or dignity, Most people nevertheless will probably agree with the homely philosophy of sharp, unceremonious John Townsend, who, in his evidence before the Committee of the preceding session (), said on this subject,
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This, then, is another offence which, it may be said, has been done away with by a change in the law. It was indeed which the law may be fairly charged with having produced--which would not have existed but for the law. The same thing may be said of the train of offences that attended upon the State Lottery. Among other things there was a large trade driven in the insurance of tickets, which was for the most part illegal, and to a great extent of sheer fraud and robbery. Writing of the manner in which this trade was carried on in , Dr. Colquhoun says, Many attempts were made to put down this practice of insurance; but it survived as long as the state lottery itself did, in defiance of the law. It was of the subjects inquired into by the Police Committee of . Sir Nathaniel Conant, chief magistrate at , stated to that committee that there were persons who had made or by that traffic; and it appears from the evidence then received that, in addition to the evils described by Dr. Colquhoun, there had by this time arisen out of the practice an extensive system of trading in informations, from which a numerous class of persons derived a regular livelihood, in great part, it is not to be doubted, by perjury. A considerable reward, something between and , was received, it seems, upon each information. All this, of course, was put an end to, along with much more immorality, when the lottery was discontinued-when the state declined any longer to raise a miserable or a-year by a process the same in principle with the thimble-rigging of our fairs and racing-grounds, only infinitely more mischievous. | |
We will notice only other crime, formerly exceedingly prevalent, which an improvement in the police arrangements of the metropolis has also almost completely put down--that of highway-robbery. Here again we must have recourse to Townsend, who is very great upon this subject:-- But the cruelty with which highway-robberies used to be accompanied had decreased nearly as much, according to Townsend, as their frequency. In his early days the plan followed was to attempt to put down the ferocity of the highwayman by an application of the penalties of the law, still more unsparing and merciless. Townsend relates that Lord Chief Justice Eyre once went the Home Circuit, beginning at Hertford and finishing at Kingston, when crimes were so desperate, that in his charge to the grand jury at Hertford he told them to be careful what bills they found, for he had made up his mind, whatever persons were convicted throughout the circuit for capital offences, to hang them all. And he kept his word; he saved neither man nor woman. In case people, men and women, were convicted of robbing a pedlar in a house in . says Townsend, And, generally, he observes in another part of his evidence, But this wholesale slaughter seems to have done no good at all; the more hanging, there were only the more, and the more hardened and desperate, criminals to catch and hang: crimes of violence only decreased when the law began to restrain its own violence--as if the law and its administration were scarcely more operative in suppressing or checking crime than in giving to it its peculiar character and temper. | |
Still, what a standing reproof and opprobrium to our boasted civilization seems that fact, the war between Law and Crime, that has gone on in every land without pause since the commencement of society, and that still rages with as little sure or distinct prospect of termination as ever! Be it observed, that | |
237 | this is not a war in any figurative sense merely, but in the plainest and most substantial meaning of the word. It is a contest carried on by force of arms, and, to as great an extent as any other war, by all sorts of bodily inflictions and agonies, including the plentiful effusion of blood and destruction of life. It has all the characteristics of what have been called the worst of wars--it is a civil war, a war of classes, a war of principles. It is a rebellion subsisting in the heart of every community, which will not be put down. The utmost, judging by all experience, that can be done, is to keep it from making head, to preserve law and order from being absolutely overborne and submerged by the angry tide that is constantly beating against their bulwarks. These bulwarks, police institutions for the prevention and detection of crime, prisons, hulks, convict colonies, stripes, treadmills, pillories, gibbets, solitary systems, silent systems, and all other penal contrivances that have yet been thought of, seem to have no more power to diminish crime than the dykes of Holland have to drink up the German Ocean. |
If crime has been, or is to be, diminished at all, it must be, apparently, through quite other means and influences. There is a notion which has got possession of many people's heads, that the proper use of our prisons and other places to which criminals are consigned is to serve as schools of reformation--that the primary or main end of punishment, in other words, is to reform the individual who is punished. The short-sightedness and confusion of thought which this notion involves might be shown in many different ways; but it may be enough here to remark, that, even if we could effectually reform all the criminals-we can catch, we should do very little, if anything at all. by that proceeding alone, to diminish the amount of crime. If we could convert all our actual criminals into well-behaved ladies and gentlemen by animal magnetism or a harlequin's wand, we should not thereby extinguish crime, nor even lower its swelling surges for more than a moment. The springs of that would not be dried up merely by the waters which they had discharged being thus pumped off; effectual draining, draining to any purpose, whether in agriculture or in social economics, is another sort of operation altogether. Make our prisons simply so many conduits for distilling or running off vice into virtue, the only effect would be to cause the fountains of crime to flow the faster in order to supply the draught thus kept up, just as the production of corn is promoted by other kinds of distilling. | |
Not, God forbid! that we would check or chill the philanthropy which seeks to train and reform, whether the inmates of our prisons or the blackguardism and profligacy of our streets. Assuredly there is no ignorance or debasement that cries louder upon our pity than that which exists among the lawless and criminal part of the community-than that which is at once the mother and, in great part also, the offspring of crime. None can have a stronger claim upon our best exertions to rescue and preserve them than those whom any cause, be it what it may, has reduced to be the outcasts of society, or has placed under the ban and iron heel of the law-whether what appears to us to be their own inherent viciousness, or the unfortunate circumstances amid which, they have been thrown. If they are to be compassionated who are only helpless and | |
238 | destitute, how much more they who are all this, and demoralized and covered with disgrace besides-abandoned in all senses of the word? Let there be no doubt or hesitation therefore about the duty of taking up any such case of degradation and wretchedness when the opportunity presents itself, or even of endeavouring to apply a systematic moral and intellectual training as part of the discipline of our prisons and penitentiaries. We are at least bound to take care that those who may be consigned to these places of punishment shall not come out more depraved than they went in--that our prisons shall not be schools of vice and crime, normal seminaries or colleges, as it were, where the best education in the worst knowledge is provided at the expense of the state--where degrees are taken in the arts of dishonesty and plunder-whence a constant supply is kept up for town and country of the most accomplished practitioners and teachers of pocket-picking, swindling, and housebreaking. Perhaps the best way of preventing a prison from becoming all this, from being a school of crime and profligacy, is to make it a school of industry and virtuous instruction. But still we must not forget that, primarily and principally, a prison is not a school of any kind, but a place of restraint and punishment--an establishment devised and maintained for the purpose of deterring the breaker of the laws through the apprehension of something much more dreadful than the pains of learning to read and write. It may be advisable to provide criminals when in durance with the means of acquiring these accomplishments, just as it is expedient or necessary to provide them, on a moderate scale, with meat and drink; but a prison is not on that account to be regarded as mainly or properly a school, any more than it is to be regarded as an inn. |
Alas! if, as some teach, the virtue of our actions lay always in their consequences, short-sighted humanity might better, in general, fold its arms and go to sleep than attempt to do good. An angelic intelligence might possibly manage to act upon this beautiful theory of consequences, but not the measure of faculty wherewith we have been gifted. Take what is perhaps the saddest of all the sights that deform our civilization, the fallen womanhood and beauty, for the most part not more steeped in sin than in sorrow, that nightly prowls along our streets, gliding like a long glittering serpent through the common crowd of passengers, by whom the touch or gaze of the noxious thing is deemed to be insult and contamination: is there any depth of wretchedness from which the heart would yearn more to deliver a fellow-creature than from this? Yet should we in this way do anything to diminish the evil? Is it not possible that every individual saved and reformed would only by her removal make room for a successor?-that the blind benevolence which rescues her may at the same time occasion the fall of another into the same state? It is indeed pretty evident that it must be so, seeing that it never has been pretended that all the exertions of philanthropy, public and private, in this way have in the least reduced the numbers of the unhappy class in question. But are these exertions, for all that, either mischievous or useless, and as such to be denounced and refrained from? It is impossible to believe that the promptings of our highest and purest feelings are so false and misleading. It were better, in that case, for ourselves and for all around us that we had been made calculating machines than men. Being constituted as we are, | |
239 | our part seems to be, in such matters, to take up the case that is before us-to do good as we have opportunity-and not to regard consequences farther than we can clearly foresee them. Otherwise, in truth, we should not be capable of acting at all, for there is no movement we can make, of which the consequences are not infinite in number, in variety, in the time and space over which they extend, and in the interests which they affect-while all we can discern, or even by any force of speculation conjecture about them, is but as the little circle which a farthing candle might illuminate in the waste of universal night. Not being able to take in the whole range of these remote possibilities, what should we gain by attempting to regulate our conduct in reference to the insignificant portion of them which we think (but are never sure) that we do perceive and comprehend? How should we be safer proceeding thus than by turning away from that region of unfathomable amplitude and mystery altogether, and acting at once as the crying circumstances of the case before us, and the sympathies of the human hearts within us, call upon us to do? It is a leap in the dark (if you will have it so) in the way as well as in the other. You may be as much misled, may be drawn in to act as detrimentally, by an imperfect consideration of possible consequences as by no consideration of them at all. But, in truth, this in the business and duties of life, is not only it is at bottom It is this in those who really feel it and act-upon it, or rather who allow themselves to be deterred by it from acting: in others, it is a mere stupid theory; in others, perhaps, a convenient though dishonest profession. But it neither misguides nor perplexes any right-minded, earnest, courageous man or woman. To recur to the case with which we set out, who is there, with a heart in its right place, who, having the opportunity and feeling otherwise called upon to endeavour to rescue some poor outcast of the pavement from infamy and destruction, ever would be withheld from moving in the matter even by the apprehension that his humane act might possibly, operating both directly and in the way of example, contribute remotely, in the mysterious concatenation of all things, to the downfall of or of other such victims? Be.it so; better it should be even so, than that the virtuous action should not have been performed-the consequences of which in an opposite direction, we may be sure, will still overbalance this and all other incidental evil; if, at least, good and not evil be the life and governing power of the universe,--and that is a truth devoutly to be believed in by all who would believe anything. |
From no part of the economy of our world, indeed, does this truth receive stronger illustration than from a right view of the great social phenomenon of which we have been speaking. At sight it may seem that crime ought to be effectually put down under a proper constitution and administration .of the law--that the law, if it put forth all its strength, ought to be able to prevent there being any such thing as crime. But the real wonder is, not that crime should continue to exist, but that law should ever have existed--not that the law should fail in completely vanquishing and extirpating crime, but that it should be at all able to keep crime under, and to hinder knavery and violence from | |
240 | being the masters of the world. How is it that the sharp intellect and the strong hand have not everywhere asserted what appears to be their natural prerogative of lording it over the weaker and more timid part of mankind? It is, no doubt, a wise policy which has substituted the rule of law and equity for this natural dominion of force and violence; but the substitution surely has been brought about and is maintained by something more divine than policy and calculation. It has the appearance of being much more the result of a sentiment or instinct of justice inherent in mankind, than of any cunning perception of its expediency or deliberate balancing of its good and evil. Of that, in any such case, masses of men are, and have ever been, nearly as incapable as the waters of the ocean would be of determining at any time by their own will and choice in what direction they should flow. But influences from heaven lead and guide both; and so human society is sustained in life and power throughout its whole organization by a wisdom higher than its own, even as the tide is rolled to and fro by a force not within itself--a force that is seen only in its effects, and that is as irresistible as it is invisible. |
Footnotes: [n.225.1] No. LXXXV., Old London Rogueries. [n.226.1] The readers of Oliver Twist will recognise something like the seminary kept in the darkened old house near Field Lane, in the following account of a School for Thieves, discovered in 1585 by Fleetwood, the recorder, and reported by him to the Lord Treasurer:--Among the rest they found out one Wotton, a gentleman born, and sometime a merchant of good credit, but fallen by time into decay. This man kept an alehouse at Smart's Key, near Billingsgate, and after, for some misdemeanor, put down, he reared up a new trade of life; and in the same house he procured all the cut-purses about the City to repair to his house. There was a school-house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. Two devices were hung up; one was a pocket, and another was a purse: the pocket had in it certain counters, and was hung about with hawk's-bells, and over the top did hang a little scaring-bell: the purse had silver in it; and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a public Foyster; and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without noise of any of the bells was adjudged a judicial Nypper, according to their terms of art. A Foyster was a pick-pocket; a Nypper was a pickpurse or cut-purse.--Maitland's London, i. 269, from Stow's Survey. Or, take this curious sketch of the villainies of the eighteenth century from the Chronicle of the Annual Register for 1765 :--March 25th. At an examination of four boys, detected at picking pockets, before the Lord Mayor, one of them, admitted as evidence, gave the following account. A man, who kept a public-house near Fleet Market, had a club of boys, whom he instructed in picking pockets and other iniquitous practices. He began by teaching them to pick a handkerchief out of his own pocket, and next his watch, by which means the evidence at last became so great an adept, that he got the publican's watch four times in one evening, when the master swore that his scholar was as perfect as one of twenty years' practice. The pilfering out of shops was the next art. In this, his instructions to his pupils were, that at such chandlers' or other shops as had hatches, one boy should knock for admittance for some trifle, whilst another was lying on his belly close to the hatch, who, when the first boy came out, the hatch remaining on jar and the owner being withdrawn, was to crawl in on all fours, and take the tills or anything else he could meet with, and to retire in the same manner. Breaking into shops by night was the third article; which was to be effected thus. As brick walls under shop windows are generally very thin, two of them were to lie under a shop window as destitute beggars, asleep in appearance, to passers by; but, when alone, were with pickers to pick the mortar out of the bricks, and so on, till they had opened a hole big enough to go in, when one was to lie, as if asleep, before the breach, till the other accomplished his purpose. [n.228.1] He says himself, I think somewhere about four and thirty years; rather better ; but, as we shall find, he afterwards speaks of knowing the office at Bow Street in the time of Sir John Fielding, who died in 1780. [n.229.1] Townsend indeed asserts that Sir John Fielding was paid by the fees of office; but he does not appear to have had a clear recollection of the matter. When afterwards asked if Sir John had any salary, he replied, Very trifling, if any; the chief magistrate used every Monday morning to settle with the clerk the account of those fees. We apprehend the three Bow Street Magistrates had salaries, though they may have also been partly paid by fees. |
