The Obligatory Act tended to reduce crime in many ways, for not only did a criminal career become much less attractive after the last Alsatia had been closed, but the efficiency of all existing police bodies was enormously increased by the uniformity and co-operation between different units which naturally followed upon the compulsory adoption of one general system through the whole country. Local control was not interfered with by this Act, but a certain standard of excellence was set up and maintained by means of the government grant--the withholding of which as a punishment for inefficiency, took the place to some extent of the amercements once levied against districts whose police had been found wanting. And finally, the vexatious restrictions which prevented constables from acting outside the narrow limits of their constablewicks, were removed by the clause which gave County constables the same powers in Boroughs as Borough Constables enjoyed in Counties, thus restoring (in a form improved by modern aids, such as the postal service and the electric telegraph) a power similar to that which our English police long ago possessed, of carrying the Hue and Cry from township to township, and from shire to shire "untill the offender be apprehended, or at the least untill he be thus pursued to the seaside." CHAPTER XVI CO-OPERATIVE POLICE AND THE SUPPRESSION OF RIOTS When the new police was first introduced, the promoters of the scheme did not look beyond the creation of a local force, sufficient to protect life and property in the metropolis and its immediate neighbourhood. No doubt Peel intended that his police should serve as a model to other forces which he hoped to see established throughout the kingdom; but it was no part of his plan that the Metropolitan Police should be extended until the whole of England was policed by a homogeneous organization administered from a central bureau in London. Such a result, however, was at one time imminent, and would have become inevitable if the process had not been arrested by the timely reforms in County and Borough, described in the last chapter; reforms which, besides helping towards the general reduction of crime, prevented also the threatened centralization, by securing to provincial districts the control of their own police. As the Metropolitan Police increased in numbers and efficiency, it began to lose its strictly local character, and to become a national police. Up to a certain point this was to the public advantage, but it would have been calamitous if the tendency had been allowed to continue beyond that point. It is obvious, however, that after the failure of the Permissive Act in 1839, the retention of local control, so desirable on many grounds, was only rendered possible by making the abolition of the parochial system universally compulsory.