When Fielding was made a magistrate for the county of Middlesex in 1748 the popular notion of the office was expressed in the nickname, "The trading justice." He was paid by fees and had a direct interest in the prosperity of crime. The fees, moreover, were very small, and it was a recognised thing that he should make his office a lucrative one by methods exemplified by Mr. Justice Squeezum in Fielding's farce. Although the great writer fulfilled the duties of his office with honour, fidelity, and zeal, he has left us in no doubt about the immorality and ignorance of many of his fellow justices. It is a relief to turn from the justice room in Bow Street in the eighteenth century with its rogues and vagabonds on their way to the whipping posts of the Bridewell, and its highwaymen and thieves starting for Tyburn by way of Newgate, and to look on the comparatively civilised picture of a metropolitan police court of to-day. A century and a half has worked wonderful reforms for us in the world of police and police courts, but one cannot honestly say that nothing remains to be done. Direct bribery is no doubt abolished, justice is fearlessly administered, but there are still traditional methods of imposing fines and imprisonment which cause the poor to think that carriage folk go more easily along the turnpikes of the law than those humble ones who travel perforce on foot. I am not writing of the police court as the antechamber of the Old Bailey. In relation to the grave crimes against society we may fairly boast that rich and poor are treated much alike. But the police court in matters within its own jurisdiction is a machine for teaching better manners to the poor. It is a somewhat harsh machine, perhaps, but in the main just and necessary at the present state of our evolution. When folk are naughty and violent and ill-mannered and ultra-selfish, and become a nuisance to their neighbours, the police, if they are poor, take them in hand, but if they are rich they are dealt with differently. Unless they are so extravagantly and absurdly naughty as to become a public as opposed to a private nuisance, there is no necessity for the police to tackle the rich. When two "lydies" go for each other in the gutters of Whitechapel the police step in, but when the same thing happens in Mayfair, society--with a big S--maintains its own discipline. The reason why rich folk are not so outwardly naughty as poor folk is very much a matter of education and environment. As Lord Haldane in his valuable speech in America explained to us, there is a "system of habitual or customary conduct, ethical rather than legal, which embraces all those obligations of the citizen which it is 'bad form' or 'not the thing' to disregard."