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classes did not penetrate into Hyde Park at the fashionable hours, and then, as now, no hired cabs were there to detract from the brilliance of the scene.

The control of the traffic, which had belonged to the "street- Police. keeper" in most parts of London, passed in 1829 to a new police force. There had been in 1818, 1822, and 1828 inquiries into the condition of the London police, which showed the organisation to be inadequate, antiquated, and indeed almost medieval in character. There was first the general police for the

City, under the control of the Lord Mayor and aldermen, which consisted of a number of officers engaged in day or night patrol, whose duty it was to visit the watch-houses and supervise the officers appointed by the wards. Each ward appointed a certain number of beadles, constables, watchmen, and streetkeepers, paid by a rate levied on the ward. The beadles were annually elected; the constables, who were chosen in rotation from the inhabitants of the ward, and were bound to attend the whole night at the watch-house, received no salary, but could hire substitutes from £8 15s. a year. Only in some wards was there an afternoon patrol, from about three or four p.m. till the night watch was set. The watchmen were appointed by the Alderman and Common Council of the ward, and since the Act of 1817 care was taken to employ none but able-bodied men. Almost every ward had a street-keeper to regulate the traffic, who attended from eight a.m. till the patrol came on duty. Besides this central and local force in the City, there was the entirely separate police of the Dean and High Steward of

[1815

Westminster, and local forces in each parish of Westminster. Further, there was the separate establishment of magistrates and clerks and police officers at Bow Street with a foot and horse patrol under their authority, who were established in 1805 to prevent highway robberies within twenty miles of

MASTER DOGBERRY, THE PARISH WATCHMAN
(From a satirical print of 1829.)

London; and also a separate organisation for the Thames police, and for six other police-courts.

The Act of 1829 declared that the limited sphere of authority and the want of connection and co-operation rendered the force inadequate, wherefore a new force under the direct control of the Home Secretary was created, and London was mapped out into police districts, all obedient to two officials, who were at first called Justices of the Peace, and in 1839

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became Commissioners. In 1856 the two Commissioners were replaced by one Commissioner and two Assistant-Commissioners. The City of London was not to be one of the Metropolitan police districts, but in 1839 it was secured that the police of the City should be of the new type under the control of the civic corporation. The original change was not brought about without a severe struggle with vested rights, and the scheme was believed to be part of a great plot to establish a military despotism. Cobbett raved against a police establishment à la Bourbon, with commissaries at the head and with subaltern officers, with men in an uniform dress, and with others dressed like other people, going about into all companies and places, and communicating what they saw and heard to the commissaries. By this system he believed that Sir Robert Peel had laid the foundation of an Austrian slavery or of a dreadful convulsion. Ultimately, however, the principle of centralisation was applied to the whole country; first by the permissive Act of 1839, which allowed justices at Quarter Sessions to create a paid constabulary, and next when, in 1856, this permission became compulsion.

COLVILLE.

THE fever heat which had carried the nation to the triumphant JAMES close of the great war was followed by a reaction in which every Scotland. industry was depressed, every interest disaffected. In 1812 the weavers of the west formed their first formidable combination against low wages and dear meal. They found it hard to exist on a weekly pittance of 8s. 6d. with meal at 3s. a peck. But the Riot Act and the shooting down of luckless victims on the streets of Glasgow crushed disaffection. Probably there were never so many destitute at one time in Edinburgh as in 1816 -a sad year for the poor, for the harvest had been unusually bad, foreign markets were glutted, and wheat was doubled in price. During the winter of 1819-20 the Clyde was frozen over for months, and employment scarcely to be had. The starving weavers flocked to Edinburgh, where relief works had been started. The heads of the well-to-do classes were stuffed with rumours of the secret drilling and arming of a vast Radical horde, and everywhere yeomanry and sharpshooters were volunteering against mob law. The excitement culminated

Radical

Rising.

George IV.

visits

[1815

in the Bonnymuir rising of April, 1820, a sort of Scottish Peterloo.

It seems to have been a diabolical plot of the party in power to entrap the disaffected into overt action. On the first Sunday of April all Glasgow was thrown into panic over a treasonable placard, calling upon the oppressed to "assert their rights at the hazard of their lives." A Government spy induced about a hundred desperate weavers to march towards Carron, and after a weary trudge the famished band were set upon by cavalry from Stirling and taken prisoners. Three of these deluded visionaries were tried and executed as leaders-Hardie, Baird, and Wilson. Carlyle, visiting Edward Irving in Glasgow immediately after the affair, says, "The Radicals are quiet. How many lies have been told about them! Poor wretches, they are to be pitied as well as condemned." As a student in Edinburgh, he had just "seen substantial burghers and other idle loyalists training themselves to the use of arms for suppressing imaginary revolts of the lower orders. Steel pills, though a very natural, are a very inefficient remedy for a decayed constitution."

To the great delight of the Tories, George IV. visited EdinEdinburgh burgh in August, 1822. Scott's adaptation of an old song, 'Carle, now the king's come!" was on every lip. He landed at Leith and held court at Holyrood amid a burst of romantic enthusiasm unknown since Prince Charlie's entry into his northern capital. It was calculated that one-seventh of the entire population feasted their eyes on their anointed king, whose sartorial sentiments must have been gratified by the magistrates' command to the citizens to dress for the occasion in nankeen pants, white vest, St. Andrew cross in hat as a cockade, and blue coat with "Welcome" on its large gilt buttons. Christison saw it all as a lad, and very sensibly remarks—“ Sir Walter Scott as M.C. and costumier was responsible for spreading the common delusion of Englishmen and foreigners that Scotland is a nation of Celtic Highlanders," an absurd delusion still growing in vogue daily.

The

Reform
Act.

No part of the kingdom took a more earnest or intelligent share than Scotland in the constitutional victory of 1832. With the opening century reforming principles had spread, mainly from the University and the Bar, and this through the influence of such men as Brougham, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Horner,

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Sir William Petty, and Lord John Russell-all legitimate products of a Scottish education in political reasoning. This was all the more surprising as Edinburgh University was under the control of the Town Council, Tories to the backbone, while the Court of Session had always been an appanage of the landed interest. A notable incident of 1817 was the appearance of

FRANCIS HORNER, BY SIR HENRY RAEBURN, R.A.
(National Portrait Gallery.)

an independent weekly, the Scotsman. Carlyle notes at the time that he had seen the first three numbers-"all a little violent in their Whiggism." Bitter partisan hostility was a feature of social life then. The scandalous licence of the Tory journals led to a fatal duel, the great sensation of the day, when Stewart of Dunearn mortally wounded Boswell, son of Johnson's biographer. Another sign of the times was the frequency of great political meetings to petition on public questions, culminating in a notable gathering in 1830 to congratulate the French on their successful revolution.

The fate of the Reform Bill was followed with breathless