The Jamaican police force is well organised and very efficient. There are inspectors and sub-inspectors, staff-sergeants and sergeants and constables, and above all one white Chief. Most of the senior officers are white men; the rank and file are black and brown, and yellow and dusky white. It is on the rank and file that the work of Government falls. A plain constable in Jamaica is a far more powerful man than any white-gloved, long-sworded police inspector in England. Every regulation beat in the island of rivers is a courthouse, presided over by an impartial and all powerful policeman-judge. Fifty times a day he will be called upon to arbitrate in matters of great delicacy. It may be that there is a doubt in the minds of two women as to the ownership of a valuable article of diet or furniture. The policeman weighs the evidence of witnesses and pronounces judgment. He will, in cases of real necessity, administer the oath to people whose mere word is open to doubt, and he makes people swear, Scotch fashion, with uplifted hands. Round such street-corner courts small crowds are allowed to congregate, and respectfully listen to the words of one whose knowledge of police-court ritual stands him in good stead. I have heard a policeman restore to a woman that good name which the jealousy of a chattering neighbour had flung to the four winds; the same man afterwards settled a knotty point in regard to the freshness of a heap of fish which a despondent purchaser pleaded were bad. This was a serious case; the constable smelt the fish and handled them with the reverence of an usher for a barrister’s brief bag. In this instance the judgment of the constable gave satisfaction to one man and made him unpopular with a crowd. It was openly suggested that he had received a promise of largess from the man whose case he upheld. As a body the force has a Spartan-like love for unpopularity, born of the exhibition of unbending power in performing their illegal office of judge and jury. I once toured the side streets of the city with a pompous black sergeant who obviously knew the town only from the kerbstone to the railing. The Jamaica police have no eyes that see through brick walls. They have a love for intrigue, but lack the capacity of meeting cunning with detective craft. If a thing is to be seen with the naked eye they see it well enough; but, as a rule, they have no imagination and no power of working up theories. Sherlock Holmes would have been a chemist only had he been born a negro.