Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/10

 a great deal, yet he does not know more about the matter than one of us, nor half so much as myself of some things. He had his information from an interested, and therefore a polluted, source,—the officers. When he says, "there are twenty thousand persons of both sexes, who get up in the morning without knowing whereabout they shall sleep at night," he makes a decent good round numbered guess, as applied to one part of the year, but not so as to another, which shows want of discrimination. But what of the fact? Does he propose a remedy? If he had pointed out the means of sheltering them at night, he would have been more beneficially employed; as the statement now stands his readers are left to conclude, "that those twenty thousand houseless wretches are upon the look out for what they can appropriate to themselves." Agreed, as to this inference; and I can tell him, there are an equal number (more) who live in comparative affluence, who are equally upon the alert in actual robbery, to say nothing of mere cheats, mace-coves, and such like."

How to steer clear of and to detect these, and a multitude of others, who are always keeping a sharp look out to entrap the property of the honest part of the community, to take in and cheat the unwary,—to rob and perhaps murder the unprotected, and to make a prey of the unsuspecting,—are the motives for this publication. As the information it contains is faithful and genuine, it cannot fail to be highly useful to the perambulator and resident Inhabitant, valuable as a