Hole) should be purchased by the State, with a
view to re-converting them into fields! He
would be surprised to see the London of to-day,
of which Hockley-in-the-Hole is almost the
centre. Some of his remarks, however, tally
very much with what we are now thinking and
saying on the great question as to how we shall
deal with our criminals. He refutes the idea,
then almost universal, that severe punishments
in all cases were necessary, and shows that the
effect of excessive rigour is only to make rogues
more desperate. And, speaking of transportation,
he observes that men whose minds are
thoroughly corrupted rarely reform, and that, on
returning from transportation, they " fall
immediately into the same company and profligate
course of life as before." These truths were again
pointed out nearly half a century later by Dr.
Colquhoun, who, in his admirable Treatise on
the Police of the Metropolis, published in 1796,
did much towards the creation of more humane
ideas in criminal jurisprudence, and of a more
vigorous administration of the restraining powers
of the law. His work contains a foreshadowing of
the system of police introduced by Sir Robert
Peel three-and-thirty years later; and in these
remarkable words (having first stated the criminal
classes, convicted or suspected, at eleven thousand
nine hundred and thirty-four) he suggests
an ameliorating influence which has only recently
been embodied in the creation of
reformatories and societies for the assistance of
discharged convicts:

"Without friends, without character, and without
the means of subsistence, what are these
unhappy mortals to do? They are no sooner known
or suspected than they are avoided. No person
will employ them, even if they were disposed to
return to the paths of honesty, unless they make
use of fraud and deception, by concealing that
they have been the inhabitants of a prison or of
the hulks. At large upon the world, without
food or raiment, and with the constant calls of
nature upon them for both; without a home or
an asylum to shelter them from the inclemency
of the weather —  what is to become of them?"
[These italics are the author's own, and show
the emphasis with which he desired to place this
important part of the problem before the public
mind.] " The police of the country has provided
no place of industry in which those who were
disposed to reform might find subsistence in
return for labour, which, in their present situation,
becomes useless to them, because no
person will purchase it by employing them. That
man will deserve a statue to his memory who
shall devise and carry into effect a plan for the
employment of discharged convicts who may be
desirous of labouring for their subsistence in an
honest way." The doctor's main position is
that, whereas " robbery and theft, as well in
houses as on the roads, have long been reduced
to a regular system," the powers of the police
should be systematised too, and that we should
not be satisfied with merely stringing up a score
of miserable wretches every morning in front of
Newgate. It took a long time before either
the government or the public would listen to
him.

The street outrages of the present century
have not been so numerous as those of the
preceding; but they have at times been bad
enough. The " Corinthians" of the days of
George the Fourth revived, in some degree, the
dissolute brutalities of their predecessors, the
Mohocks; and little more than thirty years
ago London was in a panic terror and not
without reason at the homicidal feats performed
at night in the public ways, according
to the example of Burke, the great
Edinburgh professor of the art of murdering
with pitch-plaisters. " Burking" was literally
the Newgate fashion of the time; but, after
a while, it went out, and other things arose and
had their day. Now, it was " hocussing" with
laudanum; now, stupifying with chloroform.
The fate of the Spanish-Yankee Filibuster,
Lopez, in the first Great Exhibition year, after
his attempt on Cuba, seems to have given a new
idea to our English footpads, of which, however,
they did not avail themselves as quickly
as might have been expected from gentlemen of
their ingenuity. The Spaniards "garotted"
Lopez, and our newspapers described the pro-
cess and naturalised the word. We knew nothing
of garotting before the autumn of 1851;
in that of 1856 we were in a panic almost equal
to the excitement we have recently passed
through.

Daniel Defoe, writing in 1729 on this ever-
present subject of street insecurity, suggests a
plan by which the public thoroughfares would
be " strongly guarded" and "gloriously illuminated."
In those two phrases he certainly hit
upon the great desiderata, and both have been
comparatively supplied in modern times. But
something still remains to be done. Our police
force seems hardly strong enough to cope with
the enormous mass of crime continually
augmenting itself in the metropolis; and it may
fairly be asked whether, in these early-closing
times, we have a reasonable amount of light
in the streets after sunset. The evil-doer
dreads light more than he dreads the policeman.
It is said that burglars will not enter
a house the windows of which are lit up.
The footpad has an equal terror of that all-
beholding and all-revealing eye. People who
recollect the time when London was illuminated
with nothing better than oil-lamps, are naturally
disposed to regard the present system as almost
supernatural; but the children of a later
generation, who have no such standard of comparison,
must judge by the simple fact whether or not
there is sufficient light for the purposes of
convenience and safety. Tried by that test, the
result is not satisfactory. Even in the best
thoroughfares there is scarcely light enough,after
the shops are closed, to see the wayfarer across
the road clear of the cabs and horses. In the
poorer ways, it is little more than darkness made
visible. If our memory does not deceive us,
there has been of late a deterioration in the
amount of artificial light supplied to Londoners.