explaining the various Crimes and Misdemeanours which are at present felt as a pressure upon the Community, and suggesting Remedies for their Prevention, by a Magistrate.' Much of the information still possesses some interest. Colquhoun suggested the appointment of a public prosecutor, the extension of the jurisdiction of stipendiary magistrates to the city proper, and the employment of convicts in reproductive labour. He pointed out the inevitable inefficiency of the old London watchmen, mainly dependent for support on their daily labour in other employments, often chosen out of charity for their poverty or advanced years, and directed by more than seventy different local authorities, who acted without co-operation and under no general system of superintendence. The work attracted the attention of the government, and even of the king, going through several editions, in the seventh of which (1806) Colquhoun proposed the establishment of a board of commissioners of police for the whole of London. It was doubtless this work which stimulated the university of Glasgow to confer on Colquhoun, in 1797, the degree of LL.D., and the West India merchants to to him in the same year to frame a plan for the prevention of depredations on their property in ships lying in the Thames a task which he undertook with the cooperation of the government, for the consequent loss of customs duties rendered the matter one of importance to the revenue. The result was the composition of his 'Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames,' 1800, and the establishment for the first time of an effective Thames police. The benefits which Colquhoun's exertions conferred on the West India planters led the colonies of St. Vincent, Nevis, Dominica, and the Virgin Islands to appoint him their agent in England.
In 1798 Colquhoun was appointed magistrate of the Queen Square Office, Westminster, where he proceeded to procure the establishment of a soup-kitchen, framing, at the request of the privy council, 'Suggestions . . . distributed over England and Wales, with a view to the encouragement of Soup Establishments, and containing plans and directions for carrying them into effect.' In 1799 was issued for private circulation his 'State of Indigence, and the Situation of the Casual Poor in the Metropolis explained,' in which he urged that wealthy parishes should be called on to mitigate the pressure of the rates on poor parishes, and recommended the establishment of a sort of charity organisation society to investigate the circumstances of applicants for relief, and to provide work for the unemployed. In the same year, one of great scarcity and distress, he suggested the provision of a supply of salt herrings and other cheap fish as food for the poor, a suggestion to which he saw effect ultimately given. In 1803 appeared his 'Treatise on the Functions and Duties of a Constable,' and in 1804 the free town of Hamburg appointed him its resident and consul-general in London, an example which was followed by the other Hanseatic towns. In 1806 he published 'A New and Appropriate System of Education for the Labouring People,' explaining that carried out in a school in Orchard Street, Westminster, of which three years before he had promoted the establishment, and in which a sound and very cheap elementary education was given to the children of the poor on Dr. Bell's system. In the same year was issued his 'Treatise on Indigence,' in which he recommended the establishment of a board of education, of a national savings bank with a state guarantee to the depositors, of a system of reproductive employment for those out of work, of a national poor-rate uniformly assessed, and the issue of a police gazette, containing instructive reading, with the statistics of crime and descriptions of the persons of offenders. His last work of importance was his 'Treatise on the Population, Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire in every quarter of the World,' 1814, of which a second edition appeared in 1815. The most noticeable section of it is that in which, often on insufficient data, Colquhoun attempted to frame an estimate of the total wealth, in all kinds, of the British empire, and not only of the value of the 'new property' created in it from year to year, but of the distribution of this among the various classes of the community. It includes a history of the public revenue and expenditure from the earliest times to 1813, and a descriptive sketch of the British colonies and of the foreign dependencies of the crown. In a concluding chapter Colquhoun predicted, with the close of the war, the growth of a surplus population, and pointed to the colonies as a promising outlet for it. This idea he developed, with a specific application to South Africa, in an anonymous pamphlet, 'Considerations on the Means of affording Profitable Employment to the Redundant Population of Great Britain and Ireland,' &c., issued in 1818 (see Lowndes, i. 502). In that year Colquhoun resigned his office of police magistrate, and there appeared in the 'European Magazine' an exhaustive account of his useful and disinterested labours (reprinted separately in the same year) signed 'Ιατρός, contributed by his son-in-law, Dr.
