assizes, as well as from the decided opinion of
many of the lawyers there, I should be induced to hazard the opinion,
that the crimes of robbery, burglary, and murder, are infinitely less
frequent than in England. The great cause of this is undoubtedly to be
attributed to the excellence of their police. Wherever such a preventive
as the system of Espionage, and that carried to the perfection which we
find it possessing in that country, exists, it is impossible that the
greater crimes should be found to any alarming decree. There is a power,
a vigour and an omnipresence in this effective police, which can check
every criminal excess before it has attained any thing like a general or
rooted influence throughout the kingdom; and its power, under the
administration of Napoleon, was exerted to an excessive degree in
France. Such a mode, however, of diminishing the catalogue of crimes,
could exist only under a state of things which the inhabitants of a free
country would not suffer for a moment; and indeed, to anyone possessing
but the faintest idea of what liberty is, there is something in the idea
of a system of espionage which is dreadful. It is like some of those
dark and gigantic daemons, embodied by the genius of fiction, the form of
which you cannot trace, although you feel its presence, which stalks
about enveloped in congenial gloom, and whose iron grasp falls upon you
the more terrible, because it is unsuspected. Fortunately such a monster
can never be met with in a free country. It shuns the pure, and
untainted atmosphere of liberty, and its lungs will only play with
freedom in the foul and thick air of a decided despotism.

The effects of this system of espionage, in destroying every thing upon
which individual happiness in society depends; the free and unrestrained
communication of opinion between friends, and even the confidence of
domestic society, can hardly be conceived by any one who has lived in a
free country. Upon this subject, I had an opportunity of conversing with
a most respectable and intelligent British merchant, who, previous to
the revolution, had been a partner in a banking-house in the French
metropolis; and afterwards had the misfortune of being kept a prisoner
in Paris for the last twelve years. The accounts he gave us regarding
the excessive rigour of the police, and the jealousy of every thing like
intercourse, were truly terrible. It had become a maxim in Paris, an
axiom whose truth was prov