1828.] [ 489 7 
THE POLICE REPORT.* 
Tue police system of England, which has been oftener the subject of 
animadversion than of sound investigation, is marked by many of the 
peculiarities which distinguish most of our institutions from those of 
other countries. Comparisons have been instituted between it and the 
more perfect inventions, as they are called, of modern times, which, in 
the continental nations, are said always to ensure the punishment, and 
often to effect the prevention of crime. Every bedy has heard stories, 
more or less miraculous, of the accuracy with which the agents of police 
in France detect crime ; and, whoever believes them, cannot doubt for a 
moment that Buonaparte was a conjuror, and that Fouché and Savary 
both dealt with the devil. We confess that we have not, personally, the 
gift of belief in a very powerful degree. Even on occasions where the 
evidence has been more incredibly strong than on those to which we 
allude, it has failed to convince us; and, when we look at the state 
of crime under the late emperor, and since the restoration of the present 
dynasty, as far as it has been ascertained, we are unable to discover the 
practical proof of that superiority of which we hear so much. The prin- 
ciples upon which the French police was remodelled, under Napoleon, 
were, in some respects, the most objectionable that a legislature ever 
avowed. They involved a multitude of restrictions upon personal liberty, 
and created a power which could not haye been endured in this country, 
at any period of our history, since we have held the rank of a nation ; 
and, although they were suited well enough to answer the ambitious 
projects of Buonaparte, and were in unison with that spirit which 
required the sacrifice of every thing that stood in the way of the accom- 
plishment of his designs, whether for good or for evil, we are no more 
prepared to believe that they tended to the real tranquillity and prospe- 
rity of his people, than that his mischievous policy in other respects 
was culculated to preserve the true interests of the state. Notwithstand- 
ing the praises that have been bestowed upon the French police, and 
which have been repeated in France and elsewhere, until eulogium is 
exhausted, its defects were glaring and monstrous. It acted upon an 
extensive scheme of espionnage, which resorted to the most base and 
infamous means of obtaining information— which encouraged the betrayal 
of trusts the most honourable, and sacred, and rewarded the treachery 
by money drawn from the impurest sourcest—which prohibited the 
press from making public.any of the delinquencies of its agents, even 
when they were convicted and punished—under which the most odious 
vices were permitted to flourish unrepressed—which could neither secure 
private property, nor ensure the safety of the state—and which has been 
well described, by a writer who had witnessed its baneful effects, as a 
contrivance “ unknown to the old régime, and incompatible with the 
new—a monster born of anarchy and despotism, and bred in the filth of 
the revolution.”{ That the system should have been a perfect one, was 
almost impossible. The circumstances of the time were unfavourable to 
its formation ; the hands by which it was put together were, with a few 
- * Report from the Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis, 11th July, 1828. 
+ The minister of police levied, annually, a tax amounting to about £400,000 sterling 
from the common gaming houses and brothels, of his own authority, and disposed of such 
is g 
part of it as he thought fit among his secret and invisible agents. 
+ Chateaubriand, La Monarchie selon la Charte, 
M.M. New Series.—Vou. VI. No. 35. 3 R é 
