The members of the English police are public servants in the fullest sense of the term; not servants of any individual, of any particular class or sect, but servants of the whole community--excepting only that part of it which in setting the law at defiance, has thereby become a public enemy. The strength of the Man in Blue, properly understood, lies in the fact that he has behind him the whole weight of public opinion; for he only wages war against the law-breaker, and in this contest can claim the goodwill of every loyal citizen. If a police constable is in need of assistance, he can call upon any bystander, and in the King's name demand his active co-operation; should the bystander refuse without being able to prove physical impossibility or lawful excuse, he can no longer be considered as a loyal citizen, but is guilty of an indictable offence and becomes liable to punishment. The basis upon which our theory of police ultimately rests, is the assumption that every lawful act performed by a police officer in the execution of his duty, has the sanction and approval of the great majority of his fellow-citizens; and under our constitution it would be impossible for any constabulary force to continue in existence, if its actions persistently ran counter to the expressed wishes of the people. The actual continuance of the English police is therefore dependent upon the consent of the people; but this mere acquiescence is not enough. If the police are to be efficient, they must earn for themselves the respect and sympathy of all classes, they must be popular. It is only on the rarest occasions that a policeman is actually the eye-witness of a crime, nor in the nature of things is he likely to be in the confidence of the criminal. As a rule he must rely on information, and generally speaking the public is the only source from which the necessary knowledge can be obtained. If the public are hostile, the one source of information is closed, and the police are rendered powerless. This difficulty has often been experienced in Ireland, where, on several occasions, it has proved a practical impossibility to discover the authors of agrarian crime, even when all the facts were well known to dozens of people, simply because the whole neighbourhood had entered into a conspiracy of silence. Such a manoeuvre instantly paralyzes the civil executive. In the olden days, when an offence had been committed and there was no culprit forthcoming, a fine was levied against the hundred or hundreds implicated, and justice was satisfied; in mediæval times, the "peine forte et dure" was employed to elicit information; but since the abolition of torture no effectual method has been invented by means of which an unwilling witness can be forced to tell what he knows; in Ireland, especially, the inducements held out by Government, to tempt a man to speak, are of little avail against the terrorism that the other side can invoke by the mere whisper of the word "informer."