But Nash not only saw to it that his fashionable clients behaved themselves. He had to contend with the camp-followers of fashion who swarmed into Bath. Mendicants infested the streets and made the gorge of those delicate eighteenth-century creatures rise with the sight of their rags and diseases. Nash knew that if he did not administer his kingdom severely, and if he allowed many of these stern realities of the world to obtrude upon the sight of the fastidious, the new-found fortunes of Bath would disappear, and his career with them. So, perhaps from an acute sense of the necessity for self-preservation, rather than from any desire to play the autocrat, he imposed his will so thoroughly that he became an unquestioned ruler. He induced the Corporation, which had entrusted him with these powers, to procure an Act in 1739 for the suppression of the beggars. It begins by reciting that "several loose, idle, and disorderly persons daily resort to the City of Bath, and remain wandering and begging about the streets and other places of the said City, and the suburbs thereof, under pretence of their being resident at The Bath for the benefit of the Mineral and Medical Waters, to the great disturbances of his Maj.'s subjects resorting to the said City. Be it enacted that the Constables, petty Constables, Tything-men, and other Peace Officers of the said City ... are hereby empowered and required to seize and apprehend all such persons who shall be so found wandering, begging, or misbehaving themselves, and them to carry before the Mayor, or some Justice, or Justices, of the Peace for the said City; who shall upon the oath of one sufficient witness, or upon his own view, commit the said person or persons so wandering or begging, to the House of Correction for any time not exceeding the space of 12 Kalendar months, and to be kept at hard labour, and receive correction as loose, idle, and disorderlie persons." So there was a reverse to the medal, and a very stringent government prevailed behind the careless, butterfly existence of the age, when literary squibs and lampoons and the gay personalities of Anstey's _New Bath Guide_ formed the excitements of the Bath.