A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: Containing a Detail of the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors by which Public and Private Property and Security are, at Present, Injured and Endangered: and Suggesting Remedies for their PreventionColquhoun, Patrick
History
A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: Containing a Detail of the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors by which Public and Private Property and Security are, at Present, Injured and Endangered: and Suggesting Remedies for their Prevention
Colquhoun, Patrick
Crime -- England -- London; Police -- England -- London
The number of persons, who with their families, find their way to the
Metropolis, from the most remote quarters of Great Britain and
Ireland, is inconceivable. In hopes of finding employment they incur
an immediate and constant expence, for lodging and subsistence, until
at length their little all is in the Pawnbrokers' shops, or sold to
raise money for the necessaries of life. If they have been virtuously
brought up in the country, despondency seizes upon their minds, in
consequence of the disappointments and hardships, their adventurous or
incautious conduct has doomed them to suffer; which as it applies to
the most deserving of this class, who will not steal, and are ashamed
to beg, often exceeds any thing that the human mind can conceive.
Their Parochial Settlements are either at a great distance, or perhaps
as natives of Scotland or Ireland, they are without even this
resource. The expence of removing, as the Law directs, is too serious
a charge to be incurred by the parish where accident has fixed them.
They are treated with neglect and contumely by the parochial Officers;
and even occasionally driven to despair. Willing to labour, but bereft
of any channel or medium through which the means of subsistence might
be procured. It is assigned to no person to hear their mournful tale,
who might be able to place them in a situation, where they might gain
a subsistence; and under such circumstances it is much to be feared,
that not a few of them either actually perish for want, or contract
diseases which ultimately terminate in premature death.
Such is frequently the situation of the more decent and virtuous class
of the labouring people, who come to seek employment in the
Metropolis. The more profligate who pursue the same course have
generally other resources. Where honest labour is not to be procured,
they connect themselves with those who live by petty or more atrocious
offences, and contribute in no small degree to the increase of the
general phalanx of delinquents. The young female part of such families
too often become prostitutes, while the males pursue acts of
depredation upon the Public, by availing themselves of the various
resources, which the defects in the Police System allow.
In addition to the families who thus resort to the Capital, young men
frequently wander up who have become liable to the penalties of the
laws, in consequence of being unable to find security for the support
of a natural Child in their own parish; or who perhaps have incurred
the punishment due to some other offence.--Without money, without
recommendations, and bereft of friends, and perhaps afraid of being
known, they resort to low public houses, where they meet with thieves
and rogues, who not unfrequently in this way recruit their gangs, as
often as the arm of Justice diminishes their numbers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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