t of every police force falls on the
householders; and our readers need not be told how heavy it sometimes
is, and how universally it is every where complained of.

Now, if there is any one peculiarity more than another by which this
generation is distinguished, it is aversion to assessment. People may
differ in other respects as to the designation by which the age should
be characterized; but we believe all will agree that it is a _tax-hating
age_. What did this nation first do on being liberated from danger by
the battle of Waterloo? Throw off the income-tax. What alone induced
them to submit to it again on the modified scale of three per cent? The
disasters in Affghanistan; the perils of our Indian empire; the rocking
of Britain to its foundation. When therefore, in such a country and in
such an age, we see numerous bodies of men--popularly elected in some
cases, in all swayed by the popular voice--concurring, in a great many
places, in the taxation of themselves for the establishment of a police,
we may rely upon it that some very general and grinding sense of
necessity has been at work to produce the effect. Nothing but this could
overcome, in men really and practically invested in this particular with
the power of self-government, the universal and almost invincible
repugnance to assessments. Rely upon it, for every crime which is
brought to light, and made the subject of commitment and trial by the
institution of a police force, ten previously existed, undetected and
unpunished, before men were driven to the _flebile remedium_, the
_ultimum malum_, of taxing themselves for the establishment of a force
to repress them.

To illustrate the strength of this resistance, and the important bearing
it has upon the present question, we shall refer only to two
instances--one in England, and one in Scotland. It is well known what a
scene of confusion and disorder South Wales has for years past been. The
bloodshed at Merthyr-Tydvil, the strikes in Glamorganshire, the attack
on Newport, and the Rebecca riots, had for a series of years fixed the
attention of all parts of the empire upon this, as one of the most
inflammable and dangerous portions of the community. Nor did these
disorders appear surprising to those who were practically acquainted
with the state of the country, overrun as it is in many places by vast
iron-works, which have brought together a great and reckless population,
and inhabited in all by a discontented a