II. CHAP. friend in office a good turn by dragging him in as a witness. So long as people only broke the law, the parish constables and the headboroughs could easily make a living. It was stated, indeed, on authority, which it is difficult to gainsay, that the headboroughs did not always wait till the law was broken to commence a prosecution. Instances commonly occurred where the headboroughs invented the charge for the sake of getting money for the prosecution of it; and language was put into the mouth of persons, whom they wanted to become prosecutors, solely for the purpose of affording the headboroughs an excuse to attend at the Old Bailey.1 Blood money. The conduct of the headboroughs in promoting prosecutions was excusable because it was imitated or even exceeded by the other police authorities. By various parliamentary statutes, commencing with the reign of William and Mary, and concluding with the reign of George II., rewards, varying in amount from 10l. to 40l. were paid on their conviction for the apprehension of any highwaymen, coiners, burglars, sheep-stealers, and convicts at large. No less than 18,000l. were paid in such rewards in the single year 1815. But, in addition to these rewards, an old Act of William III. authorised the issue of what was technically called a Tyburn ticket, to any person who apprehended a felon. A Tyburn ticket' exempted the holder from serving in any office in the parish in which the felony was committed. It was transferable; it was usually sold; and was worth from 127. to 407.-the price varying in the different parishes. Any person, who succeeded, therefore, in apprehending the utterer of false money, or even a man with false money upon him, was entitled, on the conviction of the offender, to 401. from the public purse, and to a parochial ticket which in certain cases was worth 401. more. An instance has already been given in this chapter 1. Report of 1818, p. 137. II. of an officer, who confessed that he had succeeded in CHAP. hanging an innocent man for the sake of this reward. Other instances of the same character may unfortunately be found by the diligent enquirer. No less than eight persons, one at least of whom was a Bow Street officer, were condemned in 1817 for seducing people into the commission of criminal offences for the purpose of obtaining the parliamentary reward on their conviction.' Blood money,' as the parliamentary reward was commonly called, was, moreover, productive of other evils than these. As blood money was only offered for particular offences, it was the interest of the police officer to avoid interference with the criminal until he committed a 40%. crime. Young children were left unpunished for the minor depredations, committed at the commencement of their criminal career, and carefully watched, in the full expectation that they would ultimately do something which would justify the grant of a reward on their apprehension. The criminal, in fact, was fostered up to a certain period of his course by the very officers who ought to have busied themselves in stamping out crime." The thief-takers—as a Middlesex magistrate put it—were interested in concealing and encouraging thieves until their crimes arrived at the highest point. Conscious of these facts, jurymen were in the habit of discounting police evidence. They could not resist the suspicion that the constable was perjuring himself for the sake of the reward. While then the detestable system led to the occasional conviction of innocent persons, it concurrently produced the constant acquittal of real offenders. The reward defeated the very purpose which had induced the legislature originally to offer it. It may perhaps be thought that the police officers clung to a system which enabled them occasionally to 1 See Police Report, 1816, p. 264; Report, 1817, pp. 324 and 423. СНАР. II. But there appears to make very large sums of money. A parliamentary reward, it has been shown, was only paid on the conviction of some of the higher class of offenders. But a reward was also paid on the conviction of persons who were rather unfortunate than guilty. The Vagrants. sturdy vagrant had been a constant object of suspicion from the days of Elizabeth; and strenuous efforts had been made to suppress vagrancy. A poor person, compelled to travel from one parish to another, was bound to provide himself with a pass, which he could only obtain by applying to a magistrate. The issue of a pass was, however, only one of the methods by which vagrancy was discouraged. Vagrants, begging their bread, were liable 1 Police Report, 1817, pp. 323 and 325. to seven days' imprisonment; and the police in some son came to the police office for a pass, the police officers The ordinary criminal escaped with impunity; the attention of the police officers was mainly directed to the 1 Police Report, 1817, pp. 325 and 352. CHAP. II. VII. CHAP. acquisition either of a 401. reward, or of an easy ten shillings,' but the governing classes endeavoured to repress other kinds of crime with the utmost rigour. It is recorded that in 1817 1,200 persons were imprisoned under the game laws. No mercy was ever shown to the poacher; and, perhaps for this very reason, the great body of the community, who had no immediate interest in game, persisted in regarding poaching as a proof of spirit and skill rather than of crime. The same thing was true of offenders against the revenue laws. The smuggler was a village hero: and smuggling was conducted with a publicity that can scarcely be credited. In 1816 twenty-four men marched in military order through Spring Bank to Cowcaddens, in the suburbs of Glasgow, where in the face of numbers of persons who bawled out "Success to smuggling," they entered a house and deposited their laden flasks.' 2 Illicit stills were to be found in almost every village in Ireland. Seventy-seven men were imprisoned at Omagh Assizes in 1816, for possessing illegal stills; sixty at Lifford; ninety at Derry, where the trials were so numerous that the gaol was not large enough to hold the offenders, many of whom were in consequence liberated on bail. Whisky, which had never paid duty, seemed in fact to possess an additional |