1 827.] Notes fcr the Month. 285 



ties of Home are very different in the man that lives in his country, and 

 the man that starves in it. The crime that has increased in England is 

 the crime to which want naturally directs men and the crime which 

 transportation punishes the crime of theft. And with Mr. Cunning- 

 ham's account of Botany Bay in one hand, and the paragraphs from the 

 Scotch an<J Yorkshire papers in the other " The Irish are still landing 

 at the rate of a thousand a week at the Broomielaw ! They are in the 

 most dreadful state of destitution, and wander about the towns even 

 without food or lodging during the night." *' Three hundred more Irish 

 peasants ! passed yesterday through Huddersfield; their state of misery 

 beggars description, and they are offering to do the work of our own ill- 

 paid peasantry, at half, or indeed at any, price !" that it should so 

 increase may be a matter of regret, but it can hardly be one of astonish- 

 ment. The worst that a thief will look to is to quit his country. " The 

 wretched," as poor Maturin truly said, " have no country !" An 

 evening paper observes, as a fact worthy of notice that the enormous 

 increase from the year 1816 to the present time has taken place during 

 a period of peace. This fact would seem to be of little consequence one 

 way or the other, for the increase in the preceding ten years (which were 

 years of war) proceeded in as nearly as possible the same ratio. But, 

 a term of peace would be so far more likely to be attended with an increase 

 of crime in a thickly peopled country than a season of war that the 

 arrangements consequent upon the latter state carry off a great number of 

 the idle and dissipated of the population, who are left to go on in mis- 

 chief until habit or necessity makes them offenders in the former. 



Speaking with reference to the Old Bailey, it gives us great pleasure to 

 observe, that the two carriers, Cato and Bean, who caused the death of a 

 man of the name of Dunn, by their furious driving on Battersea Bridge 

 some time back, have been found guilty of manslaughter at the Croydon 

 assizes, and sentenced to seven years " forced labour" (as our French 

 neighbours term it) in the Hulks. And it is extremely desirable, moreover 

 now public attention has been drawn to the subject that some act 

 should pass, to inflict in cases where absolute death does not occur 

 something like a punishment upon stage-coachmen carriers butchers 

 and the whole of that variety of artists indeed, generally, who do mischief 

 by their carelessness and insolence in driving through the streets about 

 every other day. It would be almost too much, if the parties who suffer 

 by the misconduct of these knaves stood upon an equality of risk with 

 them, to admit that the lives and limbs of sober and respectable individuals 

 may be endangered by ruffians who are too drunk, or too desperate, to 

 have any consideration for their own. But the fact is, that those who 

 do the mischief, nineteen times in twenty, are themselves in a situation to 

 run no risk whatever. Every man who is in the habit of driving near town, 

 will have observed that, whenever he meets a stage coach or a butcher's 

 cart it is he who must turn out of the road ; and usually with very little 

 notice, or room, allowed him for doing so. And this is an insolence which 

 arises merely from the consciousness of superior weight and strength : 

 because the same Paddington coachman who drives almost wilfully against 

 a light chariot, or a gig, or a man whose horse is restive so that he cannot 

 instantly get out of the way, regulates himself with the most exemplary 

 modesty and caution, when he approaches a brewer's dray or a broad - 

 wheeled waggon. An act of parliament is much wanted to reach sum- 

 marily and decidedly every man who does mischief in the streets by care- 



