THE THREE KINGDOMS.

THE incidents of the past month are fraught with warning to writers of history. There has been so
alarming a succession of events at once strange and humiliating, and the recurrence of crime and disaster
has been so revolting and incessant, that, to a statist who should merely aim at effect in the portraiture of a
period, and think it fair to seize any fact, however extreme or exceptional, wherewith to form general
conclusions, we might seem to have suddenly retrograded from Queen Victoria, Lord John Russell, and
Doctor Sumner, to Dick Turpin, Jerry Abershaw, and the Pope. Were it possible to imagine M. Ledru Rollin,
for example, inspired for the occasion by a regard to the rights of conscience and property, one might fancy
him describing, for a second edition of his Décadence de l'Angleterre, the condition of English society, and its
results during October 1850, somewhat in the following strain.

"It became at this period perfectly evident that the restraints of order and law, as well as the obligations
of conscience, had lost their power over the ill-disposed. With irrepressible and insolent defiance Robbery
and Murder stalked through the land. Houses were entered in the metropolis at mid-day, their inmates left
half-strangled, and property of singular value carried off without hindrance. Men were waylaid in the public
thoroughfares, struck into insensibility, and plundered of all they possessed. Jewellers' shops were stripped
in the Strand. In broad day, in Adam Street, Adelphi, a government messenger was stopped and rifled.
Highway robbery was committed in St. Paul's churchyard. Infernal machines were delivered by hand
in Bermondsey. Houses were entered in the Regent's Park, and only saved from plunder by the timely
and gallant resistance of the men and women servants. The counties in closest vicinity with the metropolis
were over-run with thieves of the most daring kind. County magistrates went to bed with six-barrelled
revolving pistols under their pillows. Bagshot was once more a solitude; and grass grew again on the old
Bath road, as in the days when it made smooth trotting for the hoofs of highwaymen's horses.

"All the incidents just mentioned, and all those to be now narrated, occurred within the brief space of
three weeks of the distressing period referred to. In the parsonage house of Frimley, a small village within
half an hour's ride of the metropolis, a venerable clergyman was murdered in his bed by burglars detected at
their midnight practices. In the same county eighteen houses had been similarly entered and robbed, and
their inmates treated with violence, in less than the same number of preceding weeks; and in the
neighbouring county of West Kent, ten parsonages had been plundered in less than the same number of
preceding months. But the fate of the rector of Frimley seemed suddenly to let loose, simultaneously, over
all the counties of England, a spirit of outrage without parallel for concentration and intensity. The Times
devoted column after column to burglaries in the provinces. Durham and Devonshire, Lancashire and
Bedford, Bucks and Staffordshire, figured in a single list served up at a morning's breakfast-table. The objects
of ruffianly attack embraced prizes as various as the government mail-carts and the meanest huckster's shops;
and so flushed were the rogues with their daring success, that they even broke into the Governor's house
in the gaol at Worcester, and carried off the plate under the very noses of warders and turnkeys. Nothing
was too high, and nothing too low, for the designs of this desperate banditti; nor could their cruelty,
when unresisted, be equalled but by their cowardice when resolutely met. A girl of fourteen, armed with
a brace of pistols, put some half dozen thieves to flight at Abbotskerswell, in Devon; 'O don't! for God's
sake, don't shoot me!' was the supplication of a cringing thief to the butler in the Regent's Park, to which
that gallant domestic responded by 'firing at his head;' a youth at Northampton sprang from bed in his
shirt upon a burglar armed to the teeth, and pinned him to the earth till assistance came; and one spirited
old maid proved too much for a couple of tall ruffians at Swindon in Gloucestershire. But these cases
were unhappily rare; for the destruction of life at this lamentable period seemed to have been sought quite
as eagerly as the abstraction of property.

"In Birmingham a gold and silver beater was struck and maimed with murderous weapons until supposed
to be dead. At Bath the landlord of a tavern, and his wife, were murderously mutilated with a razor. At
another hotel in Kendal, an aged dissenting minister was horribly wounded and half suffocated in his bed.
A labouring man in Oxfordshire savagely murdered his wife. At a farmer's house in Laugharne two murders
were committed within a few days of each other. In another part of South Wales an elderly lady was
poisoned for the chance of an inheritance. At a small town in Lincolnshire a ferocious old drunkard, of
seventy-three, stabbed to death a youth who would have prevented his murdering his aged partner. At
Haverfordwest an old woman was found murdered in a ditch. A murdered infant was picked up in one of
the most populous of the London squares; and, in Essex, a poor seduced girl and her unborn infant were
mercilessly strangled.  'He has fair hair,' said the reporter of the leading journal of England, describing the
seducer and supposed murderer, in the last-mentioned case, 'a brilliant florid complexion, small delicate features,
regular in their contour, and a general cast of countenance very expressive of mildness and rustic innocence!'
Such was the fashion at this deplorable juncture of speaking of persons charged with the most detestable
crimes.

"It cannot of course be thought surprising that the whereabouts of the Police should have become matter