nd ill-instructed peasantry.
Population had advanced with unexampled rapidity--having increased, from
1831 to 1841, _thirty-six and a tenth_ per cent in Monmouthshire; the
greatest increase during the same period of any county in the British
empire.[3] Here then, if anywhere, it might have been expected that a
general feeling of insecurity, the sense of an overbearing necessity,
would have overcome the general repugnance of men towards local
assessment, and led to the establishment of a police force in all the
counties of South Wales, on a scale adequate to the magnitude of the
danger with which they were threatened. Was it so? Had the counties
taken the requisite steps to avoid the calamity? Quite the reverse; the
aversion to a police assessment was so strong, that nothing whatever
had been done. Glamorganshire had only established one on a small scale,
after repeated and earnest efforts on the part of its able and
public-spirited lord-lieutenant, the Marquis of Bute; and the Rebecca
riots surprised the adjoining counties without any preparation whatever.
And even after those disgraceful disorders had continued several weeks,
and rendered South Wales the scandal of the empire, and the astonishment
of Europe; still the repugnance to assessment was such, that it was only
after a severe struggle, and by no small exertions, that it was at
length carried; and the public-spirited member for the county, who to
his infinite credit brought forward the measure, stated at the county
meeting on the subject, that he was aware he endangered his seat by so
doing!

The Scotch have shown themselves not a whit behind their southern
compatriots in repugnance to a police assessment. In Lanarkshire, as it
is well known, the iron and coal trades have made unexampled progress
during the last ten years. Its population, in consequence, has
enormously increased; having risen from 316,000 to 434,000 in ten years,
from 1831 to 1841--an increase of thirty-six per cent in that short
time--the next to Monmouthshire of the whole empire. Crime had, of
course, enormously increased. In 1835, the committals for serious
offences were 401: in 1842, they had risen to 696--being an increase of
seventy-five per cent in seven years.[4] Serious crime, therefore, so
far as detected, was doubling in ten years, while population was
doubling in thirty--in other words, detected crime was increasing _three
times as fast as the numbers of the people_. Disturbances, as