Patrick Colquhoun was a prolific writer on the subjects of indigence and crime, producing books and pamphlets throughout the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Colquhoun was particularly important in helping to legitimate the notion that preventive rather than remedial measures were necessary to combat these social problems. By indigence Colquhoun meant the state of those unable to procure subsistence "to the extent nature requires." Colquhoun believed, moreover, that the vast majority of the indigent were so through their own faults and moral shortcomings--in other words, they were culpably indigent--and that criminals were regularly recruited from their ranks. Colquhoun's books were very popular, and he had close links both to the Evangelicals and to Jeremy Bentham, representatives of the two main schools of thought in nineteenth-century attempts to deal with poverty and crime. In his understanding of indigence, Colquhoun combined elements from both schools: he insisted that the morals...