THE 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 



Nefo 



VOL. V.] APRIL, 1828. [No. 28. 



POLICE OF THE METROPOLIS. GENERAL INCREASE OK CRIME. 



THE parliamentary fashion of the day is the appointment of " com- 

 missions" and " committees." A passion has come over us for caution 

 in all things, and delay , and extra ultra consideration. We have become 

 deeply impressed on the sudden with the superiority of " second thoughts;" 

 and entertain no argument now to any change, until five-and-twenty 

 select bodies of five-and-twenty gentlemen have five-and-twenty times 

 sat and " reported" upon it. Thus, two months back, upon the compe- 

 tency of " the Game Laws," and now upon the state of " the Police/' 

 with piles upon piles of information before us, we resolve not to take 

 any measures but to inquire farther by means of another ' ' committee." 

 This is wrong ; because it is a waste of life and leisure. If the public is to 

 be amused, and the time got over if this is all that is meant " com- 

 mittees" are well calculated enough to effect that object : but if any thing 

 like action is intended, such repeated appointments lead only to much 

 needless delay ; and to covering simple questions with such a mass of 

 blunder and subterfuge, and extraneous details, that men's patience, as 

 well as their understandings, turn away hopeless from the thought of 

 digging out or disentangling them. A committee can only be useful 

 where facts upon a given subject are wanted. We have half-a-dozen 

 volumes of fact and of abuse unreproved the produce of the police 

 committees of 1816 and 1822, upon the table before us. If committees 

 are to continue to sit with all their cumbrous machinery every time 

 any measure of domestic policy is to be suggested what, we should 

 desire to ask, is the province or where the utility of a minister ? 



The observations, however, with which the right honourable Secre- 

 tary for the Home Department introduced his motion on the recent occa- 

 sion for the appointment of a committee, seem to us singularly bare of 

 any thing, in the shape of principle, which should guide or govern the 

 committee in its inquiries. The fact of the increase of crime in the coun- 

 try and in the metropolis of late years a fact as to which few people 

 entertained any doubt is established by the production of some tables. 

 And there is a complaint not very well sustained of the condition of 

 the nightly watch : w r ith a proposition for making it general, instead of 



M. M. New Series. VOL. V. No. 28. 2 X 



