on of Birmingham_ (1878).

[98] _History of Birmingham_ (2nd edition), p. 327.

[99] The first edition, 1795, the sixth, from which I quote, in 1800. In
Benthams _Works_, x. 330, it is said that in 1798, 7500 copies of this
book had been sold.

[100] In 1814 Colquhoun published an elaborate account of the _Resources
of the British Empire_, showing similar qualities.

[101] _Police_, p. 310.

[102] _Police_, p. 105.

[103] _Ibid._ p. 13.

[104] _Ibid._ p. 211.

[105] _Ibid._ p. 136.

[106] _Police_, p. 60.

[107] _Ibid._ p. 481.

[108] _Ibid._ p. 7.

[109] _Ibid._ p. 298.

[110] _Police_, p. 99.

[111] Bentham's _Works_, x. 329 _seq._

[112] _Ibid._ v. 335.

[113] Bentham's _Works_, iv. 3, 121.

[114] Cobbett's _State Trials_, xvii. 297-626.

III. EDUCATION

Another topic treated by Colquhoun marks the initial stage of
controversies which were soon to grow warm. Colquhoun boasts of the
number of charities for which London was already conspicuous. A growing
facility for forming associations of all kinds, political, religious,
scientific, and charitable, is an obvious characteristic of modern
progress. Where in earlier times a college or a hospital had to be
endowed by a founder and invested by charter with corporate personality,
it is now necessary only to call a meeting, form a committee, and appeal
for subscriptions. Societies of various kinds had sprung up during the
century. Artists, men of science, agriculturists, and men of literary
tastes, had founded innumerable academies and 'philosophical
institutes.' The great London hospitals, dependent upon voluntary
subscriptions, had been founded during the first half of the century.
Colquhoun counts the annual revenue of various charitable institutions
at L445,000, besides which the endowments produced L150,000, and the
poor-rates L255,000.[115] Among these a considerable number were
intended to promote education. Here, as in some other cases, it seems
that people at the end of the century were often taking up an impulse
given a century before. So the Society for promoting Christian
Knowledge, founded in 1699, and the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, founded in 1701, were supplemented by the Church Missionary
Society and the Religious Tract Society, both founded in 1799. The
societies for the reformation of manners, prevalent at the end of the
seventeenth century, were taken as a model by Wilberforce and his
friends at the end of the