Foremost amongst the many objects for which Bentham worked were the amendment of the criminal code, the improvement of the Poor Laws, the abolition of transportation, sanitary and prison reform, systematic registration, and the instituting of public prosecutors, in short better police all round and in the widest sense of the term. Though most of Bentham's best work was done in the eighteenth, his doctrines received but little attention in this country before the nineteenth century, and the practical reforms which he advocated, though for the most part inaugurated in his own lifetime, were the immediate achievements of his disciples and friends. His own special hobbies were not altogether successful, the panopticon idea did not repay him for the labour and the money which he lavished upon it, and his philosophy did not prove the complete panacea for human ills that he anticipated; but through the medium of his friend Romilly he slew the Draconian monster, and he pointed out the path which Colquhoun followed and which ultimately led to the genesis of modern police. The pamphlets of the two Fieldings, and the exertions of other minor reformers who succeeded them, had no doubt done something to stir up public opinion and to pave the way for a better system, but their combined influence was only effectual up to a certain point, and the virtue of the remedies they proposed was not sufficiently potent to get to the root of the all-pervading mischief. The credit of being the first to perceive the true functions of a rational police force, as it should be, belongs to Bentham,[172] and the credit of formulating the details and presenting them in a tangible and practical shape to his contemporaries is due to Dr Colquhoun, who, in 1796, published his famous treatise "On the Police of the Metropolis."