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