But courts of justice know nothing of a cause more than what is told them on oath by a witness;and the most flagitious villain upon earth is tried in the same manner as a man of the best character who is accused of the same crime.Meanwhile,amidst all my fatigues and distresses,I had the satisfaction to find my endeavors had been attended with such success that this hellish society were almost utterly extirpated,and that,instead of reading of murders and street-robberies in the news almost every morning,there was,in the remaining part of the month of November,and in all December,not only no such thing as a murder,but not even a street-robbery committed.Some such,indeed,were mentioned in the public papers;but they were all found on the strictest inquiry,to be false.In this entire freedom from street-robberies,during the dark months,no man will,I believe,scruple to acknowledge that the winter of 1753stands unrivaled,during a course of many years;and this may possibly appear the more extraordinary to those who recollect the outrages with which it began.Having thus fully accomplished my undertaking,I went into the country,in a very weak and deplorable condition,with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice,a dropsy,and an asthma,altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh.Mine was now no longer what was called a Bath case;nor,if it had been so,had I strength remaining sufficient to go thither,a ride of six miles only being attended with an intolerable fatigue.I now discharged my lodgings at Bath,which I had hitherto kept.I began in earnest to look on my case as desperate,and I had vanity enough to rank myself with those heroes who,of old times,became voluntary sacrifices to the good of the public.But,lest the reader should be too eager to catch at the word VANITY,and should be unwilling to indulge me with so sublime a gratification,for I think he is not too apt to gratify me,I will take my key a pitch lower,and will frankly own that I had a stronger motive than the love of the public to push me on:I will therefore confess to him that my private affairs at the beginning of the winter had but a gloomy aspect;for I had not plundered the public or the poor of those sums which men,who are always ready to plunder both as much as they can,have been pleased to suspect me of taking:on the contrary,by composing,instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars (which I blush when I say hath not been universally practiced),and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left,I had reduced an income of about five hundred pounds[13]a-year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than three hundred pounds;a considerable proportion of which remained with my clerk;and,indeed,if the whole had done so,as it ought,he would be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four in the most unwholesome,as well as nauseous air in the universe,and which hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his morals.
[13]A predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one thousand pounds a-year in his office;but how he did this (if indeed he did it)is to me a secret.His clerk,now mine,told me I had more business than he had ever known there;I am sure I had as much as any man could do.The truth is,the fees are so very low,when any are due,and so much is done for nothing,that,if a single justice of peace had business enough to employ twenty clerks,neither he nor they would get much by their labor.
The public will not,therefore,I hope,think I betray a secret when I inform them that I received from the Government a yearly pension out of the public service money;which,I believe,indeed,would have been larger had my great patron been convinced of an error,which I have heard him utter more than once,that he could not indeed say that the acting as a principal justice of peace in Westminster was on all accounts very desirable,but that all the world knew it was a very lucrative office.Now,to have shown him plainly that a man must be a rogue to make a very little this way,and that he could not make much by being as great a rogue as he could be,would have required more confidence than,I believe,he had in me,and more of his conversation than he chose to allow me;I therefore resigned the office and the farther execution of my plan to my brother,who had long been myassistant.And now,lest the case between me and the reader should be the same in both instances as it was between me and the great man,I will not add another word on the subject.
But,not to trouble the reader with anecdotes,contrary to my own rule laid down in my preface,I assure him I thought my family was very slenderly provided for;and that my health began to decline so fast that I had very little more of life left to accomplish what I had thought of too late.I rejoiced therefore greatly in seeing an opportunity,as I apprehended,of gaining such merit in the eve of the public,that,if my life were the sacrifice to it,my friends might think they did a popular act in putting my family at least beyond the reach of necessity,which I myself began to despair of doing.And though I disclaim all pretense to that Spartan or Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the public good,I do solemnly declare I have that love for my family.