the Duke of Cumberland, who at the age of
forty-five in consequence of his excesses in drink exhibited a body
swollen and bloated and tortured with disease.

[Illustration: VESSELS UNLOADING AT THE CUSTOMS HOUSE, AT THE BEGINNING
OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.]

If you look at a map of London of this time you will see that the city
extended a long way up and down the river on either bank. Outside the
walls there were the crowded districts of Whitechapel, Cripplegate,
Bishopsgate, St. Katherine's, Wapping, Ratcliff, Shadwell, Stepney, and
others. These places were not only outside the wards and the
jurisdiction of the City, but they were outside any government whatever.
They were growing up in some parts without schools, churches, or any
rule, order, or discipline whatever. The people in many of these
quarters were of the working classes, but too often of the criminal
class. They were rude and rough and ignorant to an extraordinary degree.
How could they be anything else, living as they did? They were so
unruly, they were so numerous, they were so ready to break out, that
they became a danger to the very existence of Order and Government. They
were kept in some kind of order by the greatest severity of punishment.
They were hanged for what we now call light offences: they were kept
half starved in foul and filthy prisons: and they were mercilessly
flogged. In the army it was not unknown for a man to receive 500 lashes:
in the navy they were always flogging the men. Horrible as it is to read
of these punishments we must remember that the men who received them
were brutal and dead to any other kind of persuasion. Drink and
ignorance and habitual vice had killed the sense of shame and stilled
the voice of conscience. The only thing they would feel was the pain of
the whip.

59. UNDER GEORGE THE SECOND.

PART V.

It was estimated, some years later than the period we are considering,
that there were then in London 3,000 receivers of stolen goods; that is
to say, people who bought without question whatever was brought to them
for sale: that the value of the goods stolen every year from the ships
lying in the river--there were then no great Docks and the lading and
unlading were carried on by lighters and barges--amounted to half a
million sterling every year: that the value of the property annually
stolen in and about London amounted to 700,000_l._: and that goods worth
half a million at least were annually stolen fr