Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

collar and clear out of them, who would see mighty little of

London, I can tell him, if I could deal with him physically.

Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes three

hulking garrotters on their way home, – which home I could

confidently swear to be within so many yards of Drury-lane, in such

a narrow and restricted direction (though they live in their

lodging quite as undisturbed as I in mine), – I went on duty with a

consideration which I respectfully offer to the new Chief

Commissioner, – in whom I thoroughly confide as a tried and

efficient public servant. How often (thought I) have I been forced

to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of

nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy

magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that

present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared go

down, and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the dark

reputation of such street or court, and how that our readers would

doubtless remember that it was always the same street or court

which was thus edifyingly discoursed about, say once a fortnight.

Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular to

every division of police employed in London, requiring instantly

the names in all districts of all such much-puffed streets or

courts which no man durst go down; and suppose that in such

circular he gave plain warning, ‘If those places really exist, they

are a proof of police inefficiency which I mean to punish; and if

they do not exist, but are a conventional fiction, then they are a

proof of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime,

which I also mean to punish’ – what then? Fictions or realities,

could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense? To

tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of

news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as

was never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam

and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the

sanctuaries and stews of the Stuarts! Why, a parity of practice,

in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, and

the Druids in a century!

Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a

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wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of

trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the

other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to

raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but

of both sexes, were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling,

fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and

hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I

had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of

that wolfish gripe, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion

in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs

and arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising the child, I had

drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this took place

among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of demolished

buildings, hard by Temple Bar.

Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police-constable,

before whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various directions, he

making feints and darts in this direction and in that, and catching

nothing. When all were frightened away, he took off his hat,

pulled out a handkerchief from it, wiped his heated brow, and

restored the handkerchief and hat to their places, with the air of

a man who had discharged a great moral duty, – as indeed he had, in

doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and I looked

about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of the

drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary ages

upon ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a

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