of anxious question, while unchecked and uninhibited violence thus raged throughout the kingdom. The
cost of guardianship being not less than £17,000 a year in the county of all others the least effectually
guarded, such a question became extremely natural; but, alas! the discovery was soon made, that the paid
conservators of order and decency, at this distressing period, had not been able to escape its general
demoralisation. Concurrently with the acts just recorded, a series of acts of criminal outrage upon the public
peace were proved against its very custodians themselves. While the unhappy goldbeater of Birmingham
was under the furious bludgeons of his assailants, two 'experienced officers,' a sub-inspector and a sergeant,
were proved to have stood within sight and hearing of the outrage, and, in reply to entreaties from the
daughter of the victim, to have refused interference with what might be merely, for what they knew, an act
of highly proper chastisement! In the same week, in the centre of English civilisation, three very gross and
wicked offences were proved against members of the metropolitan force; and one of its superior officers
was charged with manslaughter by a coroner's jury, for having beaten and maltreated to death an industrious
inoffensive artisan. But the general disorganisation of society exhibited appearances even more alarming. It
was not simply to the lower servants of the law, but to its highest administrators, even to its makers and
judges, that the scandal of this unhappy time extended. An Ex-Lord-High-Chancellor of England was fined
for unlawful practices with fishing-nets; and a Nobleman in the most exalted rank of the peerage assaulted,
without provocation, two wayfaring young collegians whom he encountered by chance (and without his
trowsers) in what the law of the land had declared to be a public pathway, but which he insanely imagined
he had as much right to shut up, as to lock up his own nether garments.

"Nay, not even here did the marks of universal degradation cease. What had heretofore been considered
the most stubborn bulwark of English independence was now discovered to have been equally undermined.
A hope prevailed that the daring spirit of burglary would have found some check in the difficulty of
disposing of the property and plate which were its spoils; but a man of the highest respectability in the City,
a bullion broker of forty years' standing in Barbican, a man who had amassed enormous wealth without
forfeiting the respect of his fellow citizens, was suddenly discovered in close correspondence with gangs
of provincial burglars, who had thus found safe and unsuspected market for their villainous trade. Nor were
encouragements to misdoing in any degree less wanting, either from those who administered what was called
justice, or from those in whose behalf it was administered. While magistrates failed properly to discriminate the
grades of guilt in criminals, society as little perceived the danger of misplaced sympathy with crime itself.
Charitable people with money to bestow, lavished it on those who had yielded to temptation and made poverty
the excuse for theft; while the patient and long suffering class whom temptation had found firm, were left to
perish on all sides around them. In Staffordshire a labouring man was as heavily punished for setting snares,
and beating with a dog, as one of the highway tramps for an act of thieving, as well as beating of a very
different order; and, by a bench of Squire Westerns in Westmoreland, the value of a dissenting minister's life
seemed to be judged pretty nearly on a par with the worth of a brass pan.

"In short, but for the unquestionable authenticity of the records preserved of this extraordinary crisis in
the British history, the relation of it would be utterly incredible. Whether the scene be the heart of the
metropolitan city, or the wilds of an Irish county, the inquirer is shocked and disgusted alike by the same
absence of all the signs or fruits of civilisation. Children and grown men were dying of absolute starvation
in the public roads of the County of Clare, at the very time when crossing-sweepers of Baker Street were
leaving large fortunes behind them. St. Luke's in England was filled with people capable of the most rational
enjoyments, whose innocent and pleasant recreations the journals duly chronicled; while a parcel of hot-
headed Presbyterians and hair-brained Roman Catholics were left free to agitate Ireland for the restoration
of her prosperous days, by bawling for the annihilation of every holder of property. The art of
Mutuality, or the Means of Trading Without Capital, was at the same time regularly taught in both countries
by societies invented for the express purpose of plunder; and four City of London firms with very sounding
titles appear to have carried on the invention with moderate success in 'a single apartment in a sort of
public house' in St. Martin's Court. All over the counties of England, concurrently with these events, arose
the flames of incendiary fires; and even claims the most monstrous were set up to a sort of vested interest
in the profits of calamity. A band of fishermen on the Norfolk coast asserted their right to a beneficial
tithe of every wreck upon their shore, by going off in their boats like so many savages of the Pacific, and
committing desperate assault on a steamer hired by the owners of the wreck for its rescue. Other as
intemperate wretches drank themselves to death from the spoils of a shipwreck washed on the coast of Liverpool;
and at the same wreck, on that same full-frequented hospitable coast, even the gallantest, best paid, and
till then most unfailing service of humanity was abandoned, and hapless creatures clinging to the sinking
shrouds saw their last hope perish within sight of its fulfilment, by the cowardly retreat of the Liverpool
life-boat before an ordinarily-tempestuous sea. Even to seamen of the higher rank the panic of the time
extended; and the commander of a steamer in the English channel, after running his ship on its most
formidable reef of rocks with a sacrifice of eleven lives, in a calm sunny day, was the first to desert the ship
he had imperilled for the supposed shelter of a boat, which he swamped by suddenly leaping into it in search
of despicable safety.

"Do these read like the records of a civilised land? Yet not even here are we permitted to close our
reiteration of barbarous events in the same single month of the eighteen hundred and fiftieth year of the Christian
dispensation. In this so-called Christian period, a man in a fair way of trade had to answer the indictment
of his parish for refusing to support his aged mother; and a lodging-house keeper in Kent Street did not
hesitate to dispossess himself of a half-dying tenant, in arrear of rent, by dragging him naked out of his sick
bed, bastinadoing him down the stairs with a heavy bludgeon, and thrusting him without covering into the
public streets, bleeding and insensible. 'Gruel indeed! what next?' asked the wife of a master-tailor in
Whitechapel who was working and starving his apprentice to death, when the lad drooped at length under
his labour of near eighteen hours a day, and required other nourishment than 'tea and dripping.' Then, of
course, very speedily, the What next? came, and the poor creature welcomed it with the affecting cry of
'Oh! God has heard my prayer!' Even children from six to ten years had caught the infection of hardness
and guilt, and were as resolute and insolent in the docks of the police courts as the most veteran offenders.
Nor this alone with children bred to neglect and shame. Thirty-three boys, well born and carefully nurtured,
had to be suddenly removed from one of the most important schools of discipline in the kingdom, with