the second method were sufficiently advertised (to cite two instances only) by the Bristol Riots and the so-called Peterloo Massacre. London police and London crowds are now renowned all over the world, the former for the general excellence of their arrangements, and the latter for their almost invariable good humour. Perhaps the credit is not always fairly apportioned, for it is not too much to say that the good humour of the crowd is more often due to the admirable tact of the police than to any inherent virtue that exclusively resides in Londoners. At first the police were hardly more successful in suppressing riots than the soldiers had been: in Birmingham as at Coldbath Fields, events shewed that the unpopularity of the new constabulary went far to neutralize the undoubted superiority naturally possessed by a civil, over a military, force for the purposes of peace maintenance. As time went on, and as police and public came to understand each other, riots became less frequent, and conflicts less bitter, until the harmony which now so happily exists was arrived at. If it is allowable to talk of a turning-point in a process which is gradual, this point was reached soon after the disturbances which commonly go by the name of the Sunday-Trading-Bill Riots. Though not accompanied by any loss of life, nor followed by those unsparing attacks on the conduct of the police that had embittered the Coldbath Fields controversy, the collision which took place in July 1855, between the Metropolitan Police and a mixed London crowd, were serious enough to stir up much of the old animosity, and to prove that, if the policeman was no longer an object of active dislike to his fellow-citizens, neither could he as yet lay claim to any great measure of popularity. The disturbances in question arose out of the following circumstances. Lord Robert Grosvenor had introduced a bill, the object of which was to prevent all buying and selling within the City of London and metropolitan police district on Sundays. Popular feeling, which ran high against the measure, found expression in a variety of ways, some serious and some serio-comic. The point of view of the masses was not badly summed up in these lines: "Sublime decree, by which our souls to save No Sunday tankards foam, no barbers shave, And chins unmown, and throats unslaked display, His Lordship's reverence for the Sabbath day."