POLICE AT THE DAWN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In the year 1801, the population of London and Middlesex hardly
exceeded a million, but how many of the individual units that went to
make up this total were engaged in criminal pursuits, it is of course
impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy, because the bulk of
the crime was undetected and consequently unrecorded. From such data
as we possess, however, it is certain that the proportion of thieves
and other delinquents to honest men must have been alarmingly high.
Between 1801 and 1811 the population increased some sixteen per cent.,
and during the same period the number of commitments rose nearly fifty
per cent.[160] This increase in the number of rogues whose careers were
cut short by capture, speaks well for the Bow Street Runners from one
point of view; but it also indicates no less surely that these officers
were making no progress at all in the art of preventing crime, which
instead of diminishing as time went on, continued to grow in volume
year by year. Indeed the state of the metropolis was such, that social
reformers might well have despaired of ever seeing an improvement;
every corrupting influence, and every criminal tendency seemed to
flourish unchecked and unrebuked in the congenial atmosphere of the
London slums: children, neglected by their parents and uncared for by
the State, got their only schooling in the gutter, where they educated
themselves, and each other, in all the tricks of vice and dishonesty.
Night after night, undisturbed by watchmen or other peace-officers,
hundreds of urchins of both sexes huddled together for shelter and
company under the fruit-stalls and barrows of Covent Garden Market. Day
after day, these homeless and unhealthy vagabonds quartered the town,
street by street, and alley by alley, in search of any prey that they
might be able to lay their hands on. Their pickings and stealings were
turned into money with fatal ease at the shop of any one of the eight
thousand receivers of stolen property, who were supposed to ply their
trade in London; and however meagre might be the income realised by the
juvenile criminal, drink in plenty, with gin at tenpence a pint, was
within the reach of all. Such licensing laws as existed, were seldom
enforced, and even after the scandalous public lotteries had been
suppressed, public-houses continued to hold minor lotteries, called
"little-goes," for all comers, men, women and children.
Mondays and Fridays were the great days for bullock-hunting, an inhuman
and brutal sport that throve in the neighbourhoods of Hackney and
Bethnal Green, with the sanction, if not with the connivance, of the
peace officers of those parishes. The procedure of the bullock-hunters
was as follows. A fee having been paid to a cattle drover, an animal
was selected from his herd, peas were put into its ears, sticks pointed
with iron were driven into its body, and the poor beast, when mad
with rage and pain, was hunted through the streets with a yelling mob
of men, women, and dogs behind it; the weavers left their looms to
join in the pursuit, and passers-by continually augmented the crowd,
until the exhausted victim could no longer be goaded into any shew of
resistance or movement, when it was left to die where it fell, or when
sufficiently recovered, to be removed to some butcher's slaughter-house.
On Sundays the favourite resort was a field adjoining Bethnal Green
Church, and here some hundreds of men and boys assembled during the
hours of divine service, to indulge in less exciting games, such
as dog-fighting and duck-hunting. On holidays and fair-days these
Saturnalian proceedings grew more outrageous than ever. In a letter
descriptive of the occurrences that used to take place at an annual
fair held in the West-end of London, which the Receiver of the
Metropolitan Police wrote to Lord Rosslyn in 1831, occurs the following
passage: "It will hardly be credited that within five or seven years
... people were robbed in open day ... and women, stripped of their
clothes, were tied to gates by the roadside; the existing police being
set at defiance."
John Sayer, the Bow Street officer, stated before a Parliamentary
Committee, that there were streets in Westminster, especially Duck
Lane, Gravel Lane, and Cock Lane, infested by a gang of desperate
men, and so dangerous that no policeman dared venture there, unless
accompanied by five or six of his comrades, for fear of being cut to
pieces. These are not highly coloured fairy-tales, but actual facts
as recounted in the Blue-books of the period, recounted moreover
without exciting any particular notice at the time. In 1812, the
crime of murder was so common, and so much on the increase, that a
Parliamentary Committee was appointed to hold an inquiry as to the
best means of combating the savage tendencies of the people. Offences
against property were even more prevalent than crimes of violence.
Spurious coin and counterfeit banknotes deluged the country.[161] In
the parish of Kensington alone there were sixteen successful, and three
unsuccessful, attempts at burglary in six weeks, and John Vickery, an
experienced Bow Street officer, calculated that in one month property
to the value of £15,000 was stolen in the City of London, without one
of the guilty parties being either known or apprehended.
Thieves and receivers, drivers of hackney coaches, and sometimes
toll-gate keepers, conspired together to rob the travelling public.
Their favourite _modus operandi_ was as follows--the thief climbed
on the back of the conveyance, unfastened the ropes that secured the
luggage, and with the assistance of an accomplice, removed the trunk
or other booty when close to the house of the confederate receiver. As
soon as the loss was discovered, the coachman repudiated all knowledge
of the affair, and having at the first opportunity put away the false
and resumed his registered number, became to all appearance an honest
cabman, against whom the police could prove nothing. The transformation
was not difficult, because numbers were not then painted on the coach
as on hackney carriages they now have to be, but were displayed on a
removable iron label.
Still more serious were the conspiracies in which solicitors and police
officers were concerned, which had for their object the levying of
blackmail from bankers and others. In this organized system of fraud
the following method was usually adopted--a man of education, with
money behind him, would plan a bank robbery, purchase the necessary
information, and hire expert thieves to do the actual work. The robbery
having been duly effected, some time would be allowed to elapse, and
then the prime mover in the affair, through his agent the police
officer, would notify to the manager of the bank that the stolen notes
or securities had been traced, and might be recovered, if a large
enough reward was forthcoming. This offer was invariably coupled
with the _proviso_ that, in the event of the proposed restitution
being carried out, no further questions should be asked, nor further
proceedings taken.
The trick seldom failed, because the parties who had been robbed knew,
that in the absence of any detective police agency worthy of the name,
acceptance of the terms offered them was the only chance they had of
recovering their property. Under the circumstances, they could hardly
be expected to be public-spirited enough to incur the heavier loss,
and at the same time, through advertising the affair, suffer some
diminution of credit, for the sake of the principles involved.
The Committee which sat in 1828, and which investigated the whole
question, considered it advisable not to publish the evidence brought
before them, but stated that they had abundant proof that frauds of
this description had for years been carried through with almost uniform
success, and to an extent altogether unsuspected by the public. They
were satisfied "that more than sixteen banks had been forced to pay
blackmail, and that more than £200,000 worth of property had, in a
short space of time, been the subject of negotiation or compromise,"
and stated that about £1200 had been paid to blackmailers by bankers
alone, "accompanied by a clearance from every risk, and perfect
impunity for their crimes."
Between 1805 and 1818 there were more than two hundred executions
for forgery alone, that is to say at the rate of one execution in
every three weeks. When one considers that only a few of the forgers
were caught, that of these not all were convicted, and that of the
convicted but a moderate percentage were hanged, we get some idea of
the prevalence of this particular offence. The alarming frequency with
which mobs began to appeal to violence to compel attention to their
grievances, real or supposed, by force of arms, was one of the most
dangerous symptoms of the age. The Food Riots of 1800, the Luddite
disturbances of 1811-1816, Spafield (1816), Manchester (1817),
Peterloo (1819),[162] and the riots throughout the manufacturing
districts in 1828-9, were all cases in point which convinced the
thoughtful that, unless something better than the shoddy defence,
which was all that the civil power could then muster, was quickly
forthcoming, the mob would soon obtain a complete mastery, to the
destruction of all law and order, just as had recently happened in
France.
The mania for duelling, again, which was now at its height, was an
indication that the prevailing spirit of lawlessness was not confined
to the masses. When hereditary lawgivers, and even Cabinet ministers,
could find no better way of settling their differences than by calling
each other out, little wonder that the rank and file followed suit, and
took the law into their own hands. It is no valid argument to say that
duelling was merely a passing fashion; by the Law of England any duel
is a gross breach of the peace; and that such deliberate infractions
should have become fashionable only proves that the law was held in
contempt, and that the police system which failed to compel people
to keep the peace was totally inadequate to the requirements of the
times. There was a period when the vendetta was the natural defence
adopted by semi-civilised communities to diminish the frequency of
murder, and to protect the honour of their women: in time blood feuds
gradually died out, not because any great change had overtaken human
nature, but because there was no longer any need for the individual
or the family to perform duties which could be executed with greater
discrimination, impartiality, and thoroughness by judges and policemen.
After the disappearance of the vendetta the custom of duelling
remained. It was felt that personal honour was too delicate a matter
to be delegated to any outsiders, and that questions in which honour
was concerned must continue to be settled by the principals themselves.
Eventually however, the same influences that rendered blood feuds
unnecessary removed the excuse for the practice of duelling; under
modern conditions, a man can usually vindicate his honour by an appeal
to public opinion, or, in the last resort, by an action for slander,
without having to submit his cause to the uncertain arbitrament of the
rapier or the pistol.
On the whole, there is no exaggeration in saying that, at the dawn
of the nineteenth century, England was passing through an epoch of
criminality darker than any other in her annals; the resurrectionist
atrocities of Burke and Hare, the more inhuman villanies of Williams
and Bishop the cold-blooded depravity of Vaughan and his accomplices,
and the other lurid crimes which belong to this age, surpass in
enormity anything before or since.
Such then was the desperate state of society at the dawn of the
century. What arrangements did the country make to protect itself
against the consequences of this accumulation of crime? What
organization was provided for the enforcement of order, and for the
protection of life and property? For its first line of defence England
trusted to the supposed deterrent effect of a rigorous penal code;
the more humane and effectual method, prevention, being lost sight of
in the mistaken belief that it was possible to extirpate crime by the
severity with which it was punished, a belief that survived in face of
the fact, that as punishment increased in bitterness, so did offences
grow in frequency and in violence.
The penal laws were written in blood. Colquhoun estimated that there
were 160 different offences which were punishable by death, without
benefit of clergy: a man could be hanged for larceny from the person if
the value of the article stolen was more than one shilling: Townsend
stated before the parliamentary commission of 1816, that he had known
as many as forty people hanged in one day: on another occasion seven
persons, four men and three women, were convicted at Kingston of being
concerned in robbing a pedlar, "they were all hanged in Kent Street,
opposite the door." Such indiscriminate infliction of the extreme
penalty of the law could serve no useful purpose,[163] on the contrary
it undoubtedly aggravated the very offences it was intended to check.
The punishment for a trivial theft being identical with that meted out
for the most heinous crime, all sense of proportion in the different
degrees of moral guilt was lost. "As well be hanged for a sheep as
for a lamb" represented a point of view not unnatural under the
circumstances, and expressed the actual mental attitude of the average
criminal.
It can easily be demonstrated that an inverse ratio exists between
the efficiency of police and the severity of sentences.[164] The
more difficult the commission of crime is made, the less necessity
will there be for deterrent measures that savour of vindictiveness.
The intimate knowledge that an effective police have of the habitual
criminal class is not only a safeguard against the conviction of the
innocent, but renders it possible to deal leniently with the juvenile,
and with the casual, offender. Within reasonable limits, the fear of
almost certain detection is a far stronger deterrent than the distant
prospect of severe punishment. Sir Samuel Romilly speaking in the House
of Commons in 1810 said, "if it were possible that punishment, as a
consequence of guilt, could be reduced to an absolute certainty, a very
slight penalty would be sufficient to prevent almost every species
of crime, except those which arise from sudden gusts of ungovernable
passion. If the restoration of the property stolen, and only a few
weeks, or even but a few days imprisonment, were the unavoidable
consequence of theft, no theft would ever be committed. No man would
steal what he was sure he could not keep."
Romilly made strenuous efforts to persuade the government to reduce the
number of offences punishable by death, but without immediate success.
Sir James Mackintosh followed in his footsteps, and in 1822 proposed
to the House that measures should be adopted "for increasing the
efficiency of the Criminal Law by mitigating its vigour." It is worthy
of remark that, at this time, Peel opposed the principles advocated by
Mackintosh and Romilly, though seven years afterwards he was the author
of the Act that gave effect to a part of Romilly's ideal, "a vigilant
and enlightened police, and punishments proportioned to the offender's
guilt."
The savage rigour of the penal code defeated its own ends in many
ways. People would not give evidence that might condemn a man to such
barbarous treatment; juries would not always convict, even when the
evidence was perfectly clear.
Consequently the law often became a dead letter, and the prospective
criminal had many inducements to tempt him to break it; for, in the
first place, he probably would never be caught; and in the second
place, the chances were, that the jury would evade the responsibility
of giving a verdict, that might lead to a sentence, that would be an
outrage to their humanity.
With crime so increasingly prevalent, there might have been some
justification for great severity of punishment, if it had been found
by experience that strong repressive measures had invariably been
followed by a permanent reduction in the number of criminals; but this
is not the lesson that history has taught. It is true that exceptional
cases have arisen from time to time in which signal severity meted out
to a prominent offender has proved the safest and best course. Prompt
and exemplary punishment, even in excess of his deserts, inflicted on
a ringleader, has often been the only way to enforce discipline or to
prevent the spread of dangerous mutiny; but such cases are rare, and
owe their success as deterrents to their rarity, and to the attention
that they excite at the time; whereas a consistent course of excessive
severity has never been a lasting success, unless combined with
powerful preventive measures,[165] and then such a course is no longer
necessary. Highway robbery and sheep-stealing were common when they
were capital offences, now they are seldom heard of, and the thieving
that invariably went on at the foot of the gallows was sufficient proof
that the popular belief in the deterrent value of public executions was
a popular fallacy.[166]
The futile cruelty of the frequency with which capital punishment
was inflicted was equalled if not exceeded by the manner in which
the secondary punishments were administered. Transportation was
introduced[167] in the reign of Charles II., but at first was not,
strictly speaking, a legal punishment, but rather an exercise of the
royal clemency towards those in "the King's Mercy"; and it may be said
to have taken the place in the social scheme of the old system of
outlawry which, in former times, enabled a capital felon to save his
life by abjuring the realm.
Labourers were required to develop the resources of America and the
West Indies, and to this end criminals under sentence of death were
often pardoned on the understanding that they transported themselves
to those colonies. Several convicts, however, were clever enough to
secure the pardon and yet avoid fulfilment of the condition on which
it was granted. By 1717 so many of these persons were at large, that
arrangements were made[168] by which felons were to be kept in prison
until they could be handed over to agents, who were required to give
security that the undesirables in question were really deported. Fifty
years later the practice of transportation was common, and had come to
be esteemed as an easy and profitable means of getting rid, once and
for all, of offenders caught transgressing the laws made by society for
its protection. Though called transportation the system really amounted
to perpetual slavery; it could nominally be inflicted for fourteen
years, but was almost invariably for life. The convicts were handed
over to contractors at so much a head, and shipped off to America to
work on the plantations: many died on the voyage, thus reducing the
profits of the traffic; in fact a Bristol contractor complained that
if another plague broke out on his ship he would have to give up the
business. To prevent this waste, an Act was passed in 1767[169] which
provided that, for the future, contractors should take the convicts
immediately they were sentenced, for fear that they should deteriorate
during their sojourn in prison, and consequently fetch less money.
After the American Revolution we lost this source of revenue, and
penal establishments at Bermuda, Gibraltar, and in New South Wales
took the place of the plantation in the social scheme. At the same
time a change took place in the method of conveying convicts to their
destination; they were no longer bought for the sake of the work that
could be got out of them, but contractors were paid for carrying them
to the penal establishments. The frightful mortality on board the ships
continued, however, until the terms of the contract were altered; as
soon as the practice of paying a fixed price for every man embarked
was discontinued, and the payment of a larger sum for every man landed
alive substituted, the convicts were treated more like human beings,
and the death-rate on these voyages was no longer excessive.
Transportation signally failed as a deterrent, partly because the
punishment was carried out so far from home, and partly on account
of the unequal manner in which the penal system was administered. In
the Crown Colonies, such as Bermuda, the servitude was of the hardest
description, but in Australia the custom arose of assigning convicts as
servants to colonists. This gave facilities for all kinds of abuses.
A glaring and often-quoted instance of the kind of thing that went on
may be cited. A certain bank clerk who had robbed his employers was
convicted and sentenced to be transported to Australia, but the stolen
property was not recovered. The convict was duly conveyed to New South
Wales; soon afterwards his wife arrived in the same colony, and having
selected her husband as a servant, the two lived together in security
and wealth on the proceeds of the robbery.
Deterrents must be advertised in order to be effectual; the county gaol
by the roadside is an ocular reminder of the reality of punishment, but
a vague knowledge that felons were serving their time in the Antipodes
was a far less potent preventive: indeed transportation came to be
regarded as desirable by many, who gladly submitted to expatriation for
the sake of getting a fresh start in life in a new land at the public
expense. Escott remarks that whilst Australia was at once a penal
settlement and a thriving colony, "the strange spectacle was seen of
honest artisans emigrating of their own accord to spots where felons
also were relegated for their offences."[170]
The second line of defence upon which the country relied for the
diminution of crime was an unpaid parochial police, sometimes assisted,
and sometimes thwarted, by the various stipendiary establishments
already described, and this combination, as we have seen, was almost as
untrustworthy as the penal system had proved itself to be.
The constables or headboroughs, and the thief-takers, or as we should
now call them, detectives, were more vigorous than the watchmen, but
in some respects they were also more dangerous to society; the former
lived largely by blackmail and the latter on blood-money. The salary of
the headborough for Shoreditch was only ninety shillings a year, the
post was not one of honour, and the stipend surely too insignificant
to be an attraction; yet there was no lack of applicants, who by the
diligent gleaning of perquisites and by the industrious collection of
blackmail, saw their way to make a good living out of the office. As
much as thirty-six shillings a day could be earned by a headborough
by appearing in a prosecution at the Old Baily, and bribes from those
employed in the liquor traffic were a still more profitable source of
income.
In 1815 alone, eighty thousand pounds was given in blood-money, an
expenditure that might almost be considered as a Government subsidy
for the encouragement of felony. Forty pounds was the reward offered
for the conviction of certain offenders, and it was obviously to
the advantage of the thief-taker not to interfere with a promising
young criminal until he should commit a forty pounds crime; premature
detection was tantamount to killing the goose that should lay the
golden egg, and the common cant phrase of the day, when referring to
a juvenile offender, was, "he doesn't weigh forty pounds yet." The
mischievous tendency of this system of rewards cannot be exaggerated,
it vitiated the whole police constitution; nor was there any chance
of recovering property until a sufficient reward was advertised to
stimulate those who alone were familiar with the haunts and methods of
thieves and receivers.
"Officers are dangerous creatures," said Townsend, after more than
thirty years' experience as a Bow Street Runner; "they have it
frequently in their power (no question about it) to turn the scale,
when the beam is level, on the other side: I mean against the poor
wretched man at the bar; Why? this thing called nature, says profit
is in the scale: and melancholy to relate, but I cannot help being
perfectly satisfied that frequently that has been the means of
convicting many and many a man.... I am convinced that whenever A is
giving evidence against B he should stand perfectly uninterested....
Nothing can be so dangerous as a public officer, where he is liable to
be tempted."
The following is a list of the rewards, that could be earned by police
and others:--
1. Highway robbery--
From the Sheriff £40 0 0} £50 0 0
From the Hundred 10 0 0}
2. Burglary--
From the Sheriff 40 0 0}
A Tyburn Ticket worth 10 0 0} 50 0 0
3. Housebreaking in
the daytime do. 50 0 0
4. Counterfeiting gold or silver coin 40 0 0
5. Do. copper coin 10 0 0
6. Stealing from any shop, warehouse
or stable, to the value
of more than five shillings 10 0 0
7. Horse stealing 20 0 0
8. Stealing cattle or sheep 10 0 0
9. Compounding a felony 40 0 0
10. Wounding and killing a Revenue
Officer 50 0 0
11. Certain Offences under the Black