Year by year, in spite of occasional set-backs, the English police have risen in the estimation of their fellow-countrymen until they have won for themselves a position in the minds of the people which for respect and regard combined is without a parallel in Europe. "Weak in numbers as the force is," wrote Mr Munro, the late Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, "it would be found in practice altogether inadequate were it not strengthened, to an extent unknown, I believe, elsewhere, by the relations that exist between the police and public, and by the thorough recognition on the part of the citizens at large of the police as their friends and protectors. The police touch all classes of the public at many points beyond the performance of their sterner duties as representatives of the law, and they touch them in a friendly way.... The police in short, are not the representatives of an arbitrary and despotic power, directed against the rights or obtrusively interfering with the pleasures of law-abiding citizens: they are simply a disciplined body of men, specially engaged in protecting 'masses' as well as 'classes,' from any infringement of their rights on the part of those who are not law-abiding." The wisdom of fostering cordial relations between the people and the civil defenders of their lives and properties seems so obvious, that it is a source of wonder that so little attention has been given to the study of how best to promote this desirable _entente cordiale_. Before the new police was instituted constables were merely despised; after the re-organization was completed they were generally feared and often hated; the fact that they won their way to popularity is to be attributed almost entirely to their own merits. At the beginning of the century Colquhoun, who was a long way in advance of his contemporaries in his conceptions of what a police force should be, wrote: "Everything that can heighten in any degree the respectability of the office of constable, adds to the security of the State, and to the safety of the life and property of every individual," but at the time only a very few people heeded what he said; and parish authorities persisted in the idea that it did not matter who or what a constable was so long as he was cheap, whilst in more recent years, politicians of a certain stamp, who ought to be alive to the fatal consequences of their action, have not scrupled to try and stir up bad blood between the constabulary and the uneducated section of the public, whenever it has suited their purposes to do so, though happily without much success.