e hackney coachmen, he says,[102] were in league with
thieves. The number of receiving houses for stolen goods had increased
in twenty years from 300 to 3000.[103] Coining was a flourishing trade,
and according to Colquhoun employed several thousand persons.[104]
Gambling had taken a fresh start about 1777 and 1778[105]; and the
keepers of tables had always money enough at command to make convictions
almost impossible. French refugees at the revolution had introduced
_rouge et noir_; and Colquhoun estimates the sums yearly lost in
gambling-houses at over L7,000,000. The gamblers might perhaps appeal
not only to the practices of their betters in the days of Fox, but to
the public lotteries. Colquhoun had various correspondents, who do not
venture to propose the abolition of a system which sanctioned the
practice, but who hope to diminish the facility for supplementary
betting on the results of the official drawing.

The war had tended to increase the number of loose and desperate
marauders who swarmed in the vast labyrinth of London streets. When we
consider the nature of the police by which these evils were to be
checked, and the criminal law which they administered, the wonder is
less that there were sometimes desperate riots (as in 1780) than that
London should have been ever able to resist a mob. Colquhoun, though a
patriotic Briton, has to admit that the French despots had at last
created an efficient police. The emperor, Joseph II., he says, inquired
for an Austrian criminal supposed to have escaped to Paris. You will
find him, replied the head of the French police, at No. 93 of such a
street in Vienna on the second-floor room looking upon such a church;
and there he was. In England a criminal could hide himself in a herd of
his like, occasionally disturbed by the inroad of a 'Bow Street runner,'
the emissary of the 'trading justices,' formerly represented by the two
Fieldings. An act of 1792 created seven new offices, to one of which
Colquhoun had been appointed. They had one hundred and eighty-nine paid
officers under them. There were also about one thousand constables.
These were small tradesmen or artisans upon whom the duty was imposed
without remuneration for a year by their parish, that is, by one of
seventy independent bodies. A 'Tyburn ticket,' given in reward for
obtaining the conviction of a criminal exempted a man from the discharge
of such offices, and could be bought for from L15 to L25. There were
al