1820.] Police, Press, Popery, and Foreign Relations. 363 



we deny altogether. We all know the absolute ease with which a case may 

 be made out for increasing the public burthens. We never saw a pubHc 

 servant run aground for want of a list of grievances ; and we are fully 

 satisfied that, whenever it may suit the purpose of a minion of power to 

 assert that London is undermined, or the Thames about to be set in 

 general conflagration, returns to that effect, and so forth, will be ready 

 to be laid on the table of tlie Collective Wisdom. But it is a direct 

 fabrication to say that robbery and riot have increased in the metropolis 

 within the last ten years. We turn from the nonsense of Home Office 

 papers to actual experience. Is it more unsafe to walk through the 

 Strand, or any of our thoroughfares now, than it was ten years ago ? Does 

 any man of the thousands and tens of thousands who pass it at all hours, 

 feel any fear of life or limb ; or does any plunder, but the phmder of 

 some country booby's pocket-handkerchief, ever startle the sense of 

 justice in a street where half the money of London is perpetually rolling 

 backwards and forwards ? What man of any tangible substance has 

 been knocked down, robbed, and slain, or any one of the three, in any 

 street of this enormous and sufficiently profligate city, by any one of its 

 enormous and more than sufficiently idle or starving population .'' We 

 might offer a reward, and offer it in vain, for the discovery of a single 

 instance of this bold experiment on the passenger ; provided that ]\Ir. 

 Peel's pompous documents are not to be taken on his own shewing — and 

 facts are a necessary part of that proof. We pronounce, unhesitatingly, 

 that the metropolis was never more exempt fi'om disorder than at this 

 hour ; that whatever disorder existed was within the reach of the sim- 

 jjlest correction ; and that least of all was there any necessity for the 

 monstrous and offensive change which substitutes the soldier for the 

 watchman, supersedes the magistrate by the half-pay colonel, and deli- 

 vers the Avhole peace of London and its vicinage into the hands of a 

 gendarmerie. 



Not that some changes were unnecessary, nor that the absurdity or 

 the negligence which placed some men in the public offices as magis- 

 trates, who had been fitter for constables or cow-herds, ought not to 

 have been reformed — not that we looked upon Sir Richard Birnie and the 

 vulgar fellows of his calibre with the most ti'ivial respect for either them 

 or the fools who placed them there, nor tliat we considered those Dog- 

 berries as more lawyers than gentlemen, or thought they possessed an 

 atom of either character, or thought that fellows who had spent their 

 best years in cleaning boots in the Duke of Northumberland's scuUerj', 

 or stitching saddles and stirrup-leathers, were the most wisely chosen in 

 their worst years to lay down the law for the inhabitants of London. 

 Quite the reverse. We should have told Sir Richard Birnie, and the 

 vulgar fellows of his calibre, go back to the place whence you came, and 

 carry your manners and your law along with you, never to return. But 

 might not all this have been done without the issue of a mandate to 

 raise a metropolitan levy under tiie command of a Horseguard de- 

 pendent? JNIight not the pocket-handkerchiefs of the Strand-going 

 population have been })rotected by a less onerous expedient than that of 

 raising a regular battalion officered from the military depot } or migl)t not 

 his Grace of Wellington, even in the moment that he snatched from 

 settling the affairs of .submissive Europe, have condescended to remem- 

 ber that the nation which now trembles at his frown, and worships his 

 shadow, still, at least, talka of its having possessed a Constitution ; has 



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