We do not suppose that the inhabitants of South Wales or the banks of the Clyde are particularly short-sighted or selfish, or more inclined to resist assessment for objects of public utility or necessity than those of other parts of the empire. On the contrary, we know that they are in a remarkable degree the reverse; and that in no part of the world are undertakings in public improvement or charity entered into with more alacrity, and supported with more liberality. We suppose the Scotch and Welsh are what other men are--neither better nor worse. We adduce these facts, not as tending to fasten any peculiar charge on them, but as indicating the general character of human nature, and the universal repugnance to taxation, which, when men are really and practically, and not in form only, invested with the power of self-government, appears the moment that any proposition of subjecting them to assessment for the purpose of local defence and protection, even under the most aggravating circumstances, is brought forward. How great, then, must have been the mass of experienced, but undetected and unpunished, crime which pervades the state, when this all but invincible repugnance has been generally overcome, and men in so many cities and counties have been induced to submit to the certainty of the visit of the tax-gatherer, rather than the chance of a visit from the thief or the burglar! And for decisive evidence that the new establishment of a police force is not, by the crimes which it is the means of binging to light, the cause of the prodigious increase of crime of late years in the British empire, we refer to the contemporary examples of two other countries, in which a police force on a far more extensive scale has been established, and has been found the means of effecting a signal _diminution_ of crime and commitment. In Hindostan, as is well known, a most extensive and admirably organized system of police has been found absolutely indispensable to repress the endless robberies of which its fertile plains had long been the theatre; and the force employed, permanently or occasionally, in this way amounts to _a hundred and sixty thousand_! The consequence has been a _diminution_ of crime and commitments, during the last forty years, fully as remarkable as this simultaneous increase in the British islands. The official reports which have been compiled in India by the British authorities, exhibit of late years the pleasing prospect of a decrease of serious crime to a third or fourth part of its former amount.[6]