THE BATAVIAN REPUBLIC
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Amsterdam, on the excellence of its municipal institutions, and the humanity of the laws by which it is governed, simply to repeat, what I before mentioned, that not more than one criminal a year, in this great city, suffers by the hand of the public executioner, and the number of persons confined in prison for insolvency rarely exceeds thirty[1].
The police of Amsterdam remains almost the same as it was before the revolution, <references>
- ↑ Colquhoun (in his Treatise on the Police of the British Metropolis, edit. 4th. p. 393) estimates the number of persons who are annually arrested in Middlesex alone at between six and seven thousand. He does not give us the number of debtors confined in London, but on an average I believe they exceed eight hundred. For the honour of the British metropolis, I hope, and am most firmly persuaded, that many of the statements of this writer are unfounded or exaggerated. In a case where easy and correct information might be obtained (as the annual number of arrests in Middlesex) I should however suppose his authority was to be relied upon; but where his calculations are built upon conjecture, he swells his catalogues of the vicious or unfortunate to a merciless extent.
