als. Naturally, power was left
to the little cliques of prosperous tradesmen, who formed close
corporations, and spent the revenues upon feasts or squandered them by
corrupt practices. Here, as in the poor-law, the insufficiency of the
administrative body suggests to contemporaries, not its reform, but its
superfluity.

The most striking account of some of the natural results is in
Colquhoun's[99] _Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis_. Patrick
Colquhoun (1745-1820), an energetic Scot, was born at Dumbarton in 1745,
had been in business at Glasgow, where he was provost in 1782 and 1783,
and in 1789 settled in London. In 1792 he obtained through Dundas an
appointment to one of the new police magistracies created by an act of
that year. He took an active part in many schemes of social reform; and
his book gives an account of the investigations by which his schemes
were suggested and justified. It must be said, however, parenthetically,
that his statistics scarcely challenge implicit confidence. Like
Sinclair and Eden, he saw the importance of obtaining facts and figures,
but his statements are suspiciously precise and elaborate.[100] The
broad facts are clear enough.

London was, he says, three miles broad and twenty-five in circumference.
The population in 1801 was 641,000. It was the largest town, and
apparently the most chaotic collection of dwellings in the civilised
world. There were, as Colquhoun asserts[101] in an often-quoted passage,
20,000 people in it, who got up every morning without knowing how they
would get through the day. There were 5000 public-houses, and 50,000
women supported, wholly or partly, by prostitution. The revenues raised
by crime amounted, as he calculates, to an annual sum of, L2,000,000.
There were whole classes of professional thieves, more or less organised
in gangs, which acted in support of each other. There were gangs on the
river, who boarded ships at night, or lay in wait round the warehouses.
The government dockyards were systematically plundered, and the same
article often sold four times over to the officials. The absence of
patrols gave ample chance to the highwaymen then peculiar to England.
Their careers, commemorated in the _Newgate Calendar_, had a certain
flavour of Robin Hood romance, and their ranks were recruited from
dissipated apprentices and tradesmen in difficulty. The fields round
London were so constantly plundered that the rent was materially
lowered. Half th