law. Grant these clever fellows impunity, and in six months they would so demoralise England that no floating property would be secure, and every commercial transaction would partake of the nature of a sweep." There is much of the gambling character of the ancient Germans extant in our sober and thinking natures. It is outweighed by many virtues, and repressed by many wise institutions. But we require much guarding. The very daring and industry of our nature lead us to speculate. Speculation is sister of extravagance and mother of gambling. We hope, in a short time, to see the Betting Shops closed, and this disfigurement removed from our metropolis. Let us, in conclusion, warn those amid our countrymen, who are playing on the brink of the abyss of ruin, by whatever flowers of fancy, or gilded net of cunning it may be covered, that there is no royal road to affluence and comfort. The lives of the most experienced rogues themselves are desperate in their fluctuations and generally end in misery, suicide, starvation, or the penal settlements. What chance can an honest man have with such depraved beings as these? If chance befriend him-and let it be ever remembered what a ridiculous minority chance can befriend, where all stake alike—the gain is generally prevented by collusion, fraud, and cunning. Gambling is the parent of all vice. The very animal instincts yield to its entrancing sway. It will beget parricide or sacrifice a daughter. It has no love, no friendship-we had well-nigh said, no self-in its selfishness; and Betting is almost synonymous with Gambling! BRUTALITY OF THE POLICE. THE police force of London is undoubtedly a wonderful body of men. Its organization as to its effective power is nearly perfect. On occasions of riot and disorder, we look with a complete reverence and an unshaken confidence at that dark and silent mass of men moving to the scene of action. At a race or a festival this force is invaluable. When we hear of disturbances in Paris, we fancy it is because they have not our police. These blue-coated heroes, without romance or trappings, whom Punch has reduced to so certain a type of stiffness and whiskers, red noses, stuffed breasts, and the clothes-lottery-fitting trowsers of men arrayed by contract! What a system it is! How admirably are offenders detected! Certainly we are far beyond the French in this characteristic of civilization. Without it, what were overgrown London? Swindling would come out beyond all bounds of decorum, and no longer confine itself to respectability and prospectuses. Poor ruffianism would abound, like rich and cloaked injustice. Instead of moral debauchery, physical confusion would ensue. Indeed, we are much better off confined to the loose ethics of the parlour, the heartlessness of the drawing-room, the roguery dignified by the name of trade and business, and in short, all respectable vice, than if we were abandoned to the mercy of the garret, or the cellar, and Jack Cade reigned triumphant, without mask, purse, or hypocrisy, in the market-place of the nation. So far for man's opinion and enjoyment. We beg leave to reserve a point for the judgment of Heaven. The life of a policeman is by no means enviable. not a gracious pursuit. He has many enemies. danger and difficulty and exposure to weather. It is There is There is liability to exceed duty, or to neglect it. There is punishment and censure for both. Decidedly we should prefer the existence of a common soldier to that of a policeman—although the latter is better paid and ranks higher in the social scale; whilst his position admits of domestic solace. The eye and hand of a policeman must be true, and his memory good and firm. He must possess many instincts, as well as much discretion and knowledge. He must have locality well developed, and be endowed with courage, determination, and patience. We are drawing the beau idéal of a policeman. As a body, we admire and respect the police. We would aid them in a difficulty, like an honest and loyal subject; but we cannot shut our eyes to their peculiar faults and individual vices—sometimes too widely spread for the safety of the public. A policeman has great power. The magistrate prefers his oath. He is backed by his brethren. His office gives him weight. The person opposed to him is prejudged. He is resisting the law. A bad, wicked, and violent policeman is a fearful scourge to the lower classes. He both creates and encourages crime, instead of repressing it. He precludes the bad from improvement, and drives the vicious frantic. It behoves, then, the law to look narrowly after its sbirri, or its ministers; for a great many such individuals exist. We ourselves have witnessed many painful instances. The amount of injustice committed upon the outcasts of society, the penniless, the friendless, the characterless, is enormous. Let Prostitution, pale and degraded, drunken and reviled, speak from that spectral tenement of clay, where the woman still lurks, and reveal the barbarities of policemen! "But in a country like this there is always interference." No! It is dangerous to interfere with the police. An out ward character is so necessary now, that no man will play Quixote, at the risk of appearing in the newspapers. Men shrink naturally from connecting themselves with the low and vile in any shape. Besides, the police "take up" interferers as well as loiterers and lookers-on, who may be dangerous witnesses. Moreover, a magistrate may make an illnatured remark, or a reporter be guilty of a slip of the pen. Men cannot sometimes conveniently account for their presence, though motives bright as Heaven may have led them forth. It is a censorious world. People sometimes glance over articles, lay them down, and take up a wrong impression. "Oh! Tomkinson,-was not that the man in that police case? I forget something about being drunk, was it not? Oh! ah! a queer character." Therefore a prudent public seldom interferes when a policeman steps forth in the lamp-light. to Our space does not allow us to enter upon any details or instances to exemplify that to which we have alluded. We may possibly recur to the subject. We shall in future keep a sharp eye upon police offenders. Criminals require as much defence, if not more, than honest men, when not actually committing crime. Let us remind Mr. whom we particularly inscribe these remarks, that even a prostitute has social rights, and that a cabman or waterman, or frequenter of a night-house for the luxury of the rich whom he serves at the fag-end of the social chain, is not necessarily outlawed, and beyond the protection of justice. Without the breath of an imputation on the character of this magistrate, let us remind him of the Lord Angelo in Measure for Measure. Let us ask him to place less confidence in the professional oath of a policeman; and, last of all, let us tell him, if ever he should be inclined to forget it, that the sword of justice never more needed the tempering finger of mercy, than in this age of selfishness and decorum, when poverty, and misery, and degradation, with God alone to appeal to, are dragged, by the iron clutches of the hardened myrmidons of the night, into the presence of well-shirted judicial propriety, in the police-courts of London. ENGLAND'S STABILITY AND JEWISH BARON ROTHSCHILD is gradually driving the liberality of England's Ministers up into a corner. In a year or two more, we can see nothing to prevent him from taking his seat in the House. The present Government stands pledged to him and to his people by the two resolutions which Lord John Russell laid on the table the other night, and a miracle must ensue to prevent the first step to what Mr. Disraeli would probably call the solution of the great Asiatic mystery. Monmouth-street is to be transported, not to St. Stephen's, but to the New Houses of Parliament, whose cumbrous but frail architecture, beautiful as it is, illustrates in some respects the epoch in English history in which it has arisen "like an exhalation" by the antique side of the muddy but majestic Thames. For the appearance which it presents is both fanciful and ornate, fragile and cumbrous, whilst its almost unbounded limits cause its perambulation to be as puzzling as the heaped-up edifice of present legal knowledge and the sky-capt and many-chambered tenement of modern opinion. It unites both the flimsy and the ponderous, to encumber a free soil no longer the sole appanage of Britons. Heaven guide its councils aright! for we are more under the sway of Money now, than when Milton described the archi |