London was,he says,three miles broad and twenty-five in circumference.
The population in 1801was 641,000.It was the largest town,and apparently the most chaotic collection of dwellings in the civilised world.There were,as Colquhoun asserts(28)in an often-quoted passage,20,000people in it,who got up every morning without knowing how they would get through the day.
There were 5000public-houses,and 50,000women supported,wholly or partly,by prostitution.The revenues raised by crime amounted,as he calculates,to an annual sum of £2,000,000.There were whole classes of professional thieves,more or less organised in gangs,which acted in support of each other.There were gangs on the river,who boarded ships at night,or lay in wait round the warehouses.The government dockyards were systematically plundered,and the same article often sold four times over to the officials.
The absence of patrols gave ample chance to the highwaymen then peculiar to England.Their careers,commemorated in the Newgate Calendar,had a certain flavour of Robin Hood romance,and their ranks were recruited from dissipated apprentices and tradesmen in difficulty.The fields round London were so constantly plundered that the rent was materially lowered.Half the hackney coachmen,he says,(29)were in league with thieves.The number of receiving houses for stolen goods had increased in twenty years from 300to 3000.(30)Coining was a flourishing trade,and according to Colquhoun employed several thousand persons.(31)Gambling had taken a fresh start about 1777and 1778;(32)and the keepers of tables had always money enough at command to make convictions almost impossible.French refugees at the revolution had introduced rouge et noir;and Colquhoun estimates the sums yearly lost in gambling-houses at over £7,000,000.The gamblers might perhaps appeal not only to the practices of their betters in the days of Fox,but to the public lotteries.
Colquhoun had various correspondents,who do not venture to propose the abolition of a system which sanctioned the practice,but who hope to diminish the facility for supplementary betting on the results of the official drawing.
The war had tended to increase the number of loose and desperate marauders who swarmed in the vast labyrinth of London streets.When we consiDer the nature of the police by which these evils were to be checked,and the criminal law which they administered,the wonder is less that there were sometimes desperate riots (as in 1780)than that London should have been ever able to resist a mob.Colquhoun,though a patriotic Briton,has to admit that the French despots had at last created an efficient police.(33)The emperor,Joseph II,he says,inquired for an Austrian criminal supposed to have escaped to Paris.You will find him,replied the head of the French police,at No.93of such a street in Vienna on the second-floor room looking upon such a church;and there he was.In England a criminal could hide himself in a herd of his like,occasionally disturbed by the inroad of a 'Bow Street runner,'the emissary of the 'trading justices,'formerly represented by the two Fieldings.
An act of 1792created seven new offices,to one of which Colquhoun had been appointed.They had one hundred and eighty-nine paid officers under them.(34)There were also about one thousand constables.These were small tradesmen or artisans upon whom the duty was imposed without remuneration for a year by their parish,that is,by one of seventy independent bodies.A 'Tyburn ticket,'given in reward for obtaining the conviction of a criminal exempted a man from the discharge of such offices,and could be bought for from £15to £25.There were also two thousand watchmen receiving from 81/2d.up to 2s.a night.These were the true successors of Dogberry;often infirm or aged persons appointed to keep them out of the workhouse.The management of this distracted force thus depended upon a miscellaneous set of bodies;the paid magistrates,the officials of the city,the justices of the peace for Middlesex,and the seventy independent parishes.
The law was as defective as the administration.Colqulhoun represents the philanthropic impulse of the day,and notices(35)that in 1787Joseph II had abolished capital punishment.His chief authority for more merciful methods is Beccaria;and it is worth remarking,for reasons which will appear hereafter,that he does not in this connection refer to Bentham,although he speaks enthusiastically(36)of Bentham's model prison,the Panopticon.