If we think of Colquhoun as the architect who designed our modern police, and of Peel as the builder who constructed its framework, we must remember that there were others who had a hand in the good work, and that a long time elapsed between the drawing of the plans and the erection of the edifice. If it is allowable to carry the simile a stage further, we may say that the Government pigeon-holed the draughtsman's plans for many years before the order was given for the foundation stone to be laid. This delay must not be attributed to indifference, but rather to necessity. It is, perhaps, a truism to say so, but in order to carry any valuable reform to a successful issue, thought must precede action. Law is the public opinion of yesterday put in force to-day, and as Professor Dicey has somewhere pointed out, legislation has almost always been the outcome of the opinion of thirty years before. No better example of the truth of this general formula could be instanced than the case of the police reforms of the nineteenth century: Bentham, Colquhoun, Romilly and others did the necessary thinking and sowed the seed in the public conscience; a period of thirty years elapsed whilst the seed was coming to maturity; meanwhile Peel and the Duke of Wellington watched the gradual ripening of public opinion and provided the necessary legislation as soon as the people were ready for it. Colquhoun, who, like Fielding, was a Middlesex magistrate, saw that the essential need was method. He recognized that before any material improvement could be looked for, or any real security obtained, the miserable jumble of wards, parishes, hundreds and boroughs, each with its private establishment of watchmen and constables, who were debarred from acting one yard outside their own boundaries, would have to be swept away, and a centralized agency substituted under the superintendence of "able, indefatigable and intelligent men."