Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 07.pdf/442

 London Police Courts.

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LONDON POLICE COURTS. By William Holloway, B.A., Author of "Leaves from a Lawyer's Diary," etc., etc. IN this article I shall endeavor to describe the system administered by our London stipendiary magistrates. Many persons, espe cially those of the criminal class, who have come to regard them as an inevitable evil, one of the vices of a constitution, calling loudly for reform, will be surprised to learn that they are comparatively a modern crea tion. Until 1792 the police of the metropolis was administered by the Lord Mayor and twenty-six aldermen, sitting in rotation every forenoon at the Guildhall and Man sion House for the City; and at Bow Street by three magistrates sitting in rotation every day for Westminster and those parts of Middlesex, Surrey, Herts, Essex and Kent lying within the metropolis. Old Bow Street Police Court was nearly opposite the present one, and close to Covent Garden, then, as now, one of the worst neighborhoods in London. Is it the irony of Fate or some economic law, that among the choicest flowers of our English gardens are found our rankest human weeds, that the howl of the midnight ruffian and the oath of the harlot are heard side by side with the strains of Mozart and the voice of Patti? "Throughout a great part of the eigh teenth century," says Sir James Stephen ( History of the Criminal Law of England, I, 229-230)," the business ofmagistrates in that part of London which was not included in the City was carried on by magistrates who were paid almost entirely by fees. What the fees precisely were, and by what law their execution was justified, I am not able to say, nor is it worth while to inquire." Townsend, a well-known Bow Street run ner, who had been in the police since 1782,

in giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons in 18 16, said: " At that time, before the Police Bill took place at all, it was a trading business; and there was Justice This and Justice That. Justice Welch in Litchfield was a great man in those days, and old Justice Hyde and Justice Girdler, and Justice Blackborough, a trading justice of Clerkenwell Green, and an old ironmonger. The plan used to be to issue out warrants and take up all the poor devils in the street, and then there was the bailing of them, two shillings four pence, which the magistrates had; and taking up one hundred girls, that would make, at two shillings four pence, eleven pounds, thirteen shillings and four pence. They sent none to gaol, the bailing them was much better." "Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails uporf yond simple thief. Hark in thine car! change places, and, handydandy, which is the justice, which the thief?" The author of "Tom Jones," "that exqui site picture of human manners," thus de scribes his experience as a justice for West minster : " By composing instead of inflam ing the quarrels of porters and beggars (which, I blush to say, has not been usually practiced), and by refusing to take a shill ing from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another, I reduced an income of about five hundred pounds of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than three hundred pounds, a con siderable proportion of which remained with my clerk; and. indeed, if the whole had done so, as it ought, he would be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four in the most un