There is no doubt that this country is well policed, and fortunately for us, there is equally no doubt that we are not over-policed. However numerous and outrageous may be the theoretical imperfections of our method for maintaining the peace, its practical superior has yet to be discovered. A police system does not only need to be efficient, it must be popular; that is to say, it must conduct its operations with so scrupulous a regard to the susceptibilities of the people that public sympathy and approval are not alienated. The problem of devising an engine of sufficient power and mechanical ability to compel subjection to a rigid standard of uniformity is not a matter of great difficulty, but there is little credit and no comfort in the indiscriminate tyranny of a Juggernaut that mangles its suicidal votaries. Government cannot be exercised without coercion, but the coercion employed ought to be reduced to the lowest possible limit consistent with safety, the ideal police force being the one which affords a maximum of protection at the cost of a minimum of interference with the lawful liberty of the subject. The real difficulty of the police problem is therefore to fix the limits where non-interference should end, and where coercion should begin. Mill enunciated the maxim that "all restraint qua restraint is an evil," and Bentham taught that only those preventive measures are sound the application of which involves no injury to the innocent; but there is one limit which cannot be disregarded if police is to be a blessing rather than a curse, and that is, that the plan adopted for the prevention of crime must never become more intolerable than the effect of the crime itself. English police, however, is not the creation of any theorist nor the product of any speculative school, it is the child of centuries of conflict and experiment. Simple pecuniary compensation to the injured, sumptuary laws for the removal of temptation, torture in lieu of legal process, the payment of blood-money to informers, martial law enforced by puritan zealots, an amateur constabulary spasmodically supported by soldiery, the wholesale execution or banishment of offenders, these and many other expedients have all in their turn been grafted on the parent stock, tried, and found wanting. Are our present methods for the maintenance of the peace, for the suppression of crime, and for the encouragement of social virtue, perfect or nearly so? We can hardly suppose that posterity will answer these questions in the affirmative, but we can at least congratulate ourselves that the people of England, no longer living under a barbarous criminal code, enjoy to-day no small measure of security for their property and persons, without having to submit to a host of meddlesome restrictions and unreasonable formalities. CHAPTER I ANGLO-SAXON AND NORMAN POLICE