Why 1829? 145government was dangerous and destructive to liberty. These men would not
necessarily oppose the extension of central-government into law enforcement
and shows how powerful the ideology of professional public service had
become since the late eighteenth century.
It was Burdett, for example, who presented a petition from five thousand
residents of St Marylebone in favour of an elective vestry bill in 1828. 'The
evil', he stated, 'was in the system of Select Vestries generally, and it was
certainly a most disgusting and absurd principle, that a whole parish should
be taxed by those in whose election they had had no voice'.^88 A public
meeting in St Marylebone in March 1829 to support another similar bill
was chaired by Joseph Hume, Radical MP for Southwark, and attended by
J.C. Hobhouse and Burdett, as well as at least one other MP, a director of the
East India Company, and several high-rank:ipg army and naval officers.
Burdett told this eminently respectable audience: 'The time had now happily
passed by, when practical innovations of the laws of the land took place, and
were overwhelmed by the encroachments of power. The public now saw the
ministers acting with and for them, the people were recovering their last
right. .. .'^89 This position was markedly different from that which Burdett
espoused in 1812 in the debate on the night watch.
Joseph Hume opposed the appointment of the Select Committee to
inquire into the police in 1828. He insisted, in good Radical fashion, that
the true cause of increasing crime was high taxes and there was no need for
yet another parliamentary inquiry to know how to remedy that. Little more
than a year later, the only point Hume raised was about the compulsory
nature of the Metropolitan Police bill. When assured that all parishes would
be required to surrender their policing authority, Hume 'was sure that the
plan, if carried into effect, would be productive of the best consequences'.
Hume was one of the MPs who had spent the late winter and spring of 1829
listening to the evidence of parish corruption and mismanagement as a
member of the Select Committee on Select Vestries.^90
The two major political forces which united to defeat the Night Watch Bill
in 1812 were thus on opposite sides in 1829. Whig and Radical in Parliament
were now aligned against the vestries. The vestries, including those that had
presided over high-quality systems of local policing, were hedged in by the
widespread public criticism. Consequently, parochial opposition to Robert
Peel's police reform was severely constrained.
The combination of Peel's political astuteness and turmoil over the structure
and conduct of parish government in 1828 and 1829 helps explain why one
finds little evidence in local records that vestries and other bodies even noticed
the Police Bill. The Clink Paving Commissioners acknowledged that it 'would