so two thousand watchmen receiving from 8-1/2d. up to 2s. a night.
These were the true successors of Dogberry; often infirm or aged persons
appointed to keep them out of the workhouse. The management of this
distracted force thus depended upon a miscellaneous set of bodies; the
paid magistrates, the officials of the city, the justices of the peace
for Middlesex, and the seventy independent parishes.

The law was as defective as the administration. Colquhoun represents the
philanthropic impulse of the day, and notices[106] that in 1787 Joseph
II. had abolished capital punishment. His chief authority for more
merciful methods is Beccaria; and it is worth remarking, for reasons
which will appear hereafter, that he does not in this connection refer
to Bentham, although he speaks enthusiastically[107] of Bentham's model
prison, the Panopticon. Colquhoun shows how strangely the severity of
the law was combined with its extreme capaciousness. He quotes
Bacon[108] for the statement that the law was a 'heterogeneous mass
concocted too often on the spur of the moment,' and gives sufficient
proofs of its truth. He desires, for example, a law to punish receivers
of stolen goods, and says that there were excellent laws in existence.
Unfortunately one law applied exclusively to the case of pewter-pots,
and another exclusively to the precious metals; neither could be used as
against receivers of horses or bank notes.[109] So a man indicted under
an act against stealing from ships on navigable rivers escaped, because
the barge from which he stole happened to be aground. Gangs could afford
to corrupt witnesses or to pay knavish lawyers skilled in applying these
vagaries of legislation. Juries also disliked convicting when the
penalty for coining sixpence was the same as the penalty for killing a
mother. It followed, as he shows by statistics, that half the persons
committed for trial escaped by petty chicanery or corruption, or the
reluctance of juries to convict for capital offences. Only about
one-fifth of the capital sentences were executed; and many were pardoned
on condition of enlisting to improve the morals of the army. The
criminals, who were neither hanged nor allowed to escape, were sent to
prisons, which were schools of vice. After the independence of the
American colonies, the system of transportation to Australia had begun
(in 1787); but the expense was enormous, and prisoners were huddled
together in the hulks at Woolwich a