the day of his arrival pawned a good many jewels, not knowing that the Monts de Piété are government institutions, and that they daily furnish the police with a list of the persons to whom they have lent money. The officials who examine these lists noticed that a certain A. B. had been very busy pawning jewelry at different loan offices, and a detective was at once sent to his hotel to make inquiries. The clerk was out, but the detective was shown to his room, overhauled his luggage, and found that one of his boxes weighed very heavy. The clerk soon afterwards returned, was ordered to open this box, and on its being found to contain a quantity of valuable trinkets was taken into custody. The London jewelers in their gratitude wanted to present the police with 1200l., but this generous offer was declined; as the Prefecture makes it a point of honour never to accept gratuities. In this matter the English police might well take example.

Everybody knows from reading police reports how easy it is for a thief to dispose of stolen property at an English pawnbroker's. If a man be respectably dressed no pains are taken, as a rule, to ascertain whether the account he gives of himself is a true one. He may call himself by what name he likes; the pawnbroker does not even ask him for a card to show that he is giving his right name and address. In France, on the contrary, stolen property is so difficult to dispose of that men who try to pawn or sell without being conversant with police rules are constantly putting their feet into traps. At the Monts de Piété sums up to 15 francs are lent on the mere production of a stamped envelope with a post-mark, bearing the pledger's name and address; but if the loan exceed 15 francs the pledger must exhibit either a passport, his feuille d'état civil, his receipt for rent, or else be accompanied by two credible witnesses who can certify to his identity. When a man presents himself at a loan office without being provided with the necessary papers, his pledge is detained and a detective is sent home with him to get the papers. If he cannot produce these he is conducted before a commissaire. The formalities which attend sales are quite as precise. A French tradesman A French tradesman

is forbidden to buy anything whatever of a stranger until he has obtained proof of who he is and where he lives. If the information published on these points is not satisfactory, he must pay the purchase money of the article offered for sale at the residence of the seller, and if the latter declines to let himself be accompanied to his dwelling, the tradesman must carry the article offered for sale to the office of the commissaire. It may be that some of these formalities are occasionally evaded; but this cannot often be the case, for the risks of detection are great, and the penalties for remissness heavy. Every tradesman knows that when a thief is caught the Juge d'Instruction always ends by worming full avowals out of him; therefore by purchasing goods of a stranger a man renders himself liable to the visit of a detective, who may overhaul his books, and finding no entry, or an irregular entry of a certain purchase, may prosecute him as a receiver of stolen goods. Moreover, if a tradesman be once caught evading the law, the police will be sure to keep watch over him afterwards, and will send secret agents to his shop from time to time to offer goods for sale. Woe to him, then, if the chance of making a good bargain tempts him to offend a second time.

The system of laying traps for people is much resorted to by the police; and it entertains a salutary terror among many who are exposed to the temptation of becoming dishonest. Parisian cabmen and omnibus conductors are very particular about carrying to the Prefecture any article that may be left in their vehicles, because they can never be sure but that the person who left the article did so intentionally. The lady who drops a bracelet, the gentleman who forgets a bagful of Napoleons, may be secret agents of the Prefecture; besides, the cabman knows that he has everything to gain by being honest. If the article left in his cab be not claimed within a year and a day it becomes his property; if the owner be forthcoming, the Prefecture takes care that the cabman shall get a suitable reward for his honesty, and it also sets a good mark to his name which may stand him in good stead should he ever commit a little peccadillo deserving punishment. The

against a man ugly facts many years old. Many an English pickpocket has discovered this to his cost. At this moment there are six Englishmen and two women who were caught in Paris on the day of the Grand Prix, and who are undergoing thirteen months' imprisonment simply because they presumed on the forgetfulness of the French police. They started for Paris on the day before the race, and a telegram from Scotland Yard heralded their arrival. The police allowed them to go to an hotel in order that they might become chargeable with using false names. As soon as they had entered their aliases on the hotel books they were apprehended, and each got twelve months pour usurpation, and one month pour rupture de ban. They had all been sentenced in Paris for picking pockets three years ago, but had flattered themselves that by coming back under new names they would avoid detection. In may be remarked, in passing, that what makes Paris such a popular hunting ground for English pickpockets is that Frenchmen are accustomed to carry pretty large sums of money in their pockets. The Frenchman seldom banks; he transacts all his business with cash and paper money; and he never takes the numbers of his bank-notes. The power of expulsion, formidable as it is, is not the weightiest of those which the police possesses. A law, whose benefits have been much controverted of late, gives the police absolute authority over women leading notoriously immoral lives. An unfortunate creature who gets into this category is compelled to take out a carte, and to submit herself to periodical medical examinations. A set of rules is laid down for her guidance, and if she transgresses these she may be imprisoned for six months without trial under the mere fat of the inspector who reports her case to the prefect. It is only fair to say that the French police use the irresponsible power thus intrusted to them with considerable discrimination; but it is nevertheless a tremendous power which must be fraught with occasional abuses.

III.

It will be seen from all that precedes that the Prefecture de Police is armed cap-à-pie for contending against crimi

nals; but more remains to be said by way of showing how many are the advantages it has over Scotland Yard. Let us take a glance at the building of the Prefecture itself, which holds the Dépôt to which all persons arrested in Paris are brought.

Every police station in the capital has. its cells; but three times a day prison vans come round to clear out the inmates and convey them to the Dépôt. The advantage of thus collecting all offenders at one central police station where the staff of detectives can get a sight of them are obvious. The Dépôt contains about 150 cells for the better class of offenders and for very great criminals, and two large halls with airing yards attached. In the first of these are confined the decently dressed and fairly respectable prisoners; in the others all the tattered and dirty vagabonds who have sunk to the most abject depth of poverty.

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In both halls the prisoners live in common, sleeping at nights on mattresses laid upon plank beds; and interspersed with them are a number of moutons or spy prisoners, whose business it is to set offenders blabbing." Every day brings a fresh squad of these moutons, and their true quality is not known even to the prison warders. They are dressed sometimes as fashionable cracksmen, sometimes as beggars; they pass themselves off for burglars, coiners, or petty thieves, according to the work they may have on hand and which consists in pumping" certain men. Who are these queer fish? Not regular detectives, but unattached agents secrets, forming part of that mysterious host of myrmidons whom the Prefect of Police has at his orders and who are paid by the piece. Many of them must be convicts who earn remission of their sentences and doles of canteen-money by acting as spies. As they are only recompensed when they render effective services, their wits grown terribly keen, and they may generally be trusted to twist criminal novices round their little fingers. When a criminal has remained three days at the Dépôt he is sent to the House of Detention (Mazas) and there he often gets a mouton for his cell companion. If this does not suffice to wring the truth out of him the Juge

d'Instruction, or examining magistrate, tries the effect of a little tantalizing and moral torture. The man is forbidden to see his friends or to write to them; he is kept in solitary confinement which may last for months; and he is not allowed to buy any little luxuries with his own money; but once a week the Juge tells him that he shall be allowed to see his friends, to write, smoke, have rations of wine, and eventually obtain a mitigation of his sentence if he tells the truth. So he does tell it at length from sheer weariness. No criminal can hold out long against the system of confinement au secret and private examinations. When a man belongs to a gang of malefactors he is always told that his accomplices have confessed and have thrown all the blame upon him; this makes him furious, he denies, calls his pals "traitors," gives up their names, tells all he knows about them, and thus throws into the hands of the police a number of scamps who but for his revelations might have remained at large.

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Compare with this system the calm, fair, judicial arrangement under which prisoners are examined in England publicly, and with the aid of counsel if they can afford it. The English prisoner is not even questioned; no hearsay evidence is admitted against him; if it were to transpire that the police had employed a convict to try and wheedle a confession out of him a general clamor of public indignation would arise. But the French prisoner is treated as dangerous beast against whom all's fair. From the moment when he gets into custody the ingenuity of the police is exercised in discovering who he is, in raking up his antecedents, and in framing a case against him out of his own lips. If he be innocent he may yet linger for months and months in prison, because a Juge d'Instruction is an irresponsible official who may take his own time about discharging him under a nolle prosequi. If, on the contrary, the man be guilty, the sentence of the law courts marks him with an indelible stain. Neither time nor repentance can obliterate it. To the end of his life, aye, and after 'his death, it will remain recorded on the books of the Prefecture and in the registry of his état civil in the commune where he was born,

that in such and such a year he was sent to prison for such and such a crime; and the evidence of this conviction will be open to the inspection of any person who applies for his character. It will stand as a permanent reproach to his children, and his children's children. Years after his death an enemy wishing to pain his descendants may copy the shameful entry from the well-kept registers of the communal Mairie and fling it in their faces.

The admirable system of French police therefore has its drawbacks, apart from those which are produced by petty interferences with the liberty of the subject. At an immense cost, by dint of keeping up a staff of secret agents who pervade all classes of society, drawingrooms as well as workshops, and who draw between them about £120,000 from the Secret Service Fund; by dint of registering, pigeon-holing, inspecting, worrying, bullying; by dint of heaping up arbitrary imprisonments and exiles, and treating whole classes of the community as outlaws to be warred against without respite or mercy, the Prefecture certainly does contrive to capture offenders against the law more surely than can be done in England. But what if this precious system have the result of promoting crime to a huge extent by mak ing men who have once fallen under the ban of the law utterly desperate ? may strike a statistician with admiration to learn that the registers of the Prefecture are so beautifully kept that they contain no less than 28,000 entries of persons bearing the name of Martin who have got into trouble during the present century; but one would like to know what became of these Martins once they had got placed on the police books? How many of them got enrolled in that hopeless class, who cannot find respectable situations because the records of their état civil is ineffaceably blotted

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who dare not even marry because in producing their papiers they must bring their wretched antecedents to light? There must have been many of these Martins, who, persecuted and ashamed, joined the ranks of those terrible revolutionary factions who hate the police with a deadly vindictiveness, and who in times of civil war fly to the Prefecture for the purpose of burning it down.

The Prefecture and all it contained was burned by the Communists in 1871, when thousands and thousands of dossiers were destroyed. But the incendiaries forgot that by help of the communal registers most of these records could be recompiled; and they have been. The 28,000 Martins did not purge their antecedents in the flames. All that they ever did amiss has been rewritten in new books which will stand until the Prefecture shall be burned again.

It is no good sign when the masses of a country loathe the police and regard the burning of its records as a popular task which every revolution is bound to perform; neither is it a good sign when the roll of criminals swells and swells as it does in France year by year. What should we say to 51 murders and 1o1 attempted murders committed in London in the course of a twelvemonth? This was the number of those crimes perpetrated in Paris in the year 1880; and no

less than 31 of them were attempts to murder policemen. Crimes of violence have become so frequent in Paris and France that they seem to indicate an epidemic of moral recklessness among the population; but coupled with other offences they serve at all events to show that a strenuous police system does not do much toward keeping a hot-blooded people quiet and honest. There were 40,351 persons arrested in Paris in 1880, of whom 3216 were foreigners, 36,412 of them were convicted and sentenced, and of this number no less than 13,106 had been convicted before. These figures speak for themselves. They do not compare favorably with the statistics of English crime, and they acquire a gloomy significance when one recollects how many desperate characters were shot down or transported after the Commune, leaving gaps in the criminal ranks, which ought not so soon to have been filled up.-Cornhill Magazine.

THRAWN

THE Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A se vere, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1 Peter 5: 8, The devil as a roaring lion, on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the

JANET.

water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising toward the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and gudemen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighborhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was toward the kirktown of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation