mption of certain propensities of human nature.'
Now, in the name of Sir Richard Birnie and all saints, from what else
SHOULD it be deduced? What did ever anybody imagine to be the end,
object, and design of government AS IT OUGHT TO BE but the same
operation, on an extended scale, which that meritorious chief magistrate
conducts on a limited one at Bow Street; to wit, the preventing one man
from injuring another? Imagine, then, that the Whiggery of Bow Street
were to rise up against the proposition that their science was to be
deduced from 'certain propensities of human nature,' and thereon were to
ratiocinate as follows:--

"'How then are we to arrive at just conclusions on a subject so
important to the happiness of mankind? Surely by that method, which, in
every experimental science to which it has been applied, has signally
increased the power and knowledge of our species,--by that method for
which our new philosophers would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy
of the barbarous respondents and opponents of the middle ages,--by the
method of induction,--by observing the present state of the world,--by
assiduously studying the history of past ages,--by sifting the evidence
of facts,--by carefully combining and contrasting those which
are authentic,--by generalising with judgment and diffidence,--by
perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test
of new facts,--by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according
as those new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound.
Proceeding thus,--patiently, diligently, candidly, we may hope to form
a system as far inferior in pretension to that which we have
been examining, and as far superior to it in real utility, as the
prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every
malady, and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the
advertising quack, which is to cure all human beings, in all climates,
of all diseases.'

"Fancy now,--only fancy,--the delivery of these wise words at Bow
Street; and think how speedily the practical catchpolls would reply,
that all this might be very fine, but, as far as they had studied
history, the naked story was, after all, that numbers of men had a
propensity to thieving, and their business was to catch them; that they,
too, had been sifters of facts; and, to say the truth, their simple
opinion was, that their brethren of the red waistcoat--though they
should be sorry to think i