Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/10

500 Concurrent Action of Police originally Intended. But, to effect this object, the concurrent service of a general and an organised police is needed, and this did not exist in England, nor does it now. On my representation, a commission was appointed to examine into the principles of the organisation of a general police force, and on its preventive as well as repressive action.- We found that the estimated number of some hundred thousand persons living by depredation as well as by mendicancy, from whom the population of the prisons as well as of reformatories is kept up, was chiefly migratory, and that migration, from one end of the kingdom to the other, required the corresponding extent of action of a police force. For the protection of London or an inland town, it might be requisite to direct measures to be taken at Liverpool, or Holyhead, or Bristol, or for Edinburgh at Portpatrick, and that, too, with the aid of poorhouses, with their vagrant wards along the whole line. Isolated forces, for the most part, only divert the predatory lines upon each other. But what can be said to the state of intelligence which permits the population of one part of the metropolis itself, the city, to be charged with an extra expense for an inferior protection, and to be subjected to an extra amount of depredation at the expense and inconvenience of the rest of the metropolis, by impeding inter-communication and pursuit of depredators, who prey upon one district whilst they live and take refuge in another. Ireland, however, has an excellently organised general police, which may now be brought to bear, by concurrent action, with that of the Poor-law service, for the attainment of the great object. The provision of a Poor-law for Ireland was opposed by Mr. O'Connell; and, as a compromise, the intended provisions against mendicancy were given up to him: but, in 1847, mendicancy was for the first time made criminal in Ireland, and it is to be hoped that active steps for its repression, with the alternative of the workhouse, will not be longer delayed. Mendicancy has, nevertheless, been largely reduced by the indirect operation of the law. But by a due exercise of the police force, which, in deference to the feelings—the prejudices if I may so call them—not of the working clergy, but of the Roman Catholic clergy, has been kept back, it may at any time be applied to its complete extirpation.

Superior Economy of Paid and Responsible Administration. "With all the shortcomings which I have described as relates to the present English Poor-law, the imperfect organisation and partial consolidation has arrested large growing evils, and has given very general satisfaction to those whose knowledge of what was really practicable is limited. By the new Poor-law organisation of paid permanent officers, paid clerks, paid relieving officers, paid masters