Police, therefore, occupies a position of vital importance in the commonwealth; it is not too much to assert that the restraining influence exerted by a good police system is as necessary to the welfare of society as are self-imposed moral and physical restraints to the health of the individual. To the superior judges fall the duties of solving abstruse legal problems, and of determining the weightiest legal issues, but it is the police magistrate who is in daily contact with the criminal and with the aggrieved person, it is he who applies the law in the first instance, and to him the large majority of the people look for decisions upon which their liberty or their property may depend. "There is scarcely a conceivable case," said a London magistrate in 1834,[2] "arising particularly among the lower orders, which may not immediately or indirectly come under the notice of the Police Offices. It is most important, therefore, that every means should be adopted for upholding their reputation, and so extending and increasing their moral influence." Only second in importance to the magistracy comes the constabulary, "the primary constitutional force for the protection of individuals in the enjoyment of their legal rights,"[3] designed to stand between the powerful and the weak, to prevent oppression, disaster and crime, and to represent the cause of law and order at all times and in all places. In every court and alley the policeman stands for good citizenship, he is a reality that the most ignorant can comprehend, and upon his impartiality, efficiency, and intelligence depends the estimation in which the law is held by the masses.