'popular' favourite in any kind of sport fails to come up to the expectations of his unknown votaries, he is morally stoned, and suffers the fate of every favourite 'nimium gaudens popularibus auris.'

The effect upon the players themselves is bad enough. Like members of modern parliaments, they are tempted to play to the gallery, not to the gallery represented by the actual spectators, but to that larger and still less discriminating crowd which follows 'sport' indolently and vicariously in the columns of the daily papers. The effect upon the public is worse. The majority of young men with any aptitude for healthy games, frightened by the grotesque criterion of excellence set up for them by the descriptive reporter, refrain from any attempt to take an active part in such competitions, but by the aid of their gate-money pay others to play for them and make a match an excuse for loafing up to the ground, sitting or dawdling away an afternoon, and 'backing their fancy'-most appropriate of phrases -with no regard for the merits of the game and with no real advantage moral or physical to themselves.

Does any one flatter himself that the spirit of professionalism, using the term in its worst sense, and the selfish egotism absolutely forced upon the players by the vicious environments of the hour, are confined to one class or station in society? If such there be, he must still be very young, and can have no personal standard of comparison. Those who have passed middle age have only to give their memory free play and contrast, say, & university or public-school cricket match of the day with what they can remember thirty or forty years ago. Unrestrained, unabashed, unrebuked, the spirit of professionalism has insidiously permeated the atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge, of Eton and Harrow. Boys and young men have lost the brilliant dash, the insouciance, the all-for-side-and-the-world-well-lost spirit which used to characterise, and should characterise, their age and their performances. To-day we see old heads on young shoulders' with a vengeance; boys play like old stagers, with an eye to the list of averages, and a scientific caution which in the young is almost repulsive. And how should it be otherwise? In their greedy competition for their form of gate-money, schools

of all grades, preparatory and public, as has already been observed, call in the aid of professionals in order that the school may turn out 'blues' if it cannot produce scholars. The professional brings with him-how can he help it?-his own atmosphere, created for him by his clients of the gallery, and by the sporting critics of the press. The schoolmaster imported on the strength of the reputation he has won in the playing-fields is a professional in all but name; he teaches as he has been taught; and so the vicious circle is perpetuated.

Pastimes have become a profession; in a sense undreamed of in the philosophy of our fathers, 'redeunt Saturnia regna.' Once more the noble savage running wild in the woods-yesterday he was called Longboat and ran in a tobacco-soddened atmosphere in a reeking stadium in New York-is the ideal of manhood. The ideal, mark you, not even the model; adoration of the 'crack sportsman' at sixpence or a shilling a head, not imitation, is the principle of the cult of the day. Vicarious patriotism, vicarious exercise, vicarious providencethese are our present ideals; and the mad craze for 'athletics by other people,' whether it be regarded as cause or effect, is amongst the most ominous and the most disheartening symptoms of the hour. We

'Have the Pyrrhic dance as yet;

Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?'

We do not even dance ourselves, but pay others to do it for us.

Art. 8.-THE ENGLISH CONCEPTION OF POLICE.

1. The Report of the Royal Commission upon the Duties of the Metropolitan Police. London: Wyman, 1908. Parliamentary Papers, 4156, 4260, 4261, of 1908.

2. Die Polizei als Grundlage und Organ der Strafrechtspflege in England, Schottland, und Irland. By Dr Karl Weidlich. Berlin: Guttentag, 1908.

3. Die Polizei in Stadt und Land in Grossbritannien. By Regierungsrat Dr C. Budding. Berlin: Guttentag, 1908. 4. Self-government. (Communalverfassung und Verwaltungsgerichte in England.) By Rudolf Gneist. Third edition. Berlin: Springer, 1871.

5. Justice and Police. (English Citizen Series.') By F. W. Maitland. London: Macmillan, 1885.

& History of Police in England. By Captain W. L. Melville Lee. London: Methuen, 1901.

1. English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Three vols. London: Longmans, 1906-1908. And other works.

Ir is perhaps a trait worth remarking in our national psychology that, although no people has displayed a more conservative veneration for historical tradition, we are yet slow to perceive the associations with the past that are presented by the commonest features of our everyday life. It is not an English habit to seek remote origins for existing institutions. At best our historical sense is but subconscious. We are curiously insensible to the direct connexion between great events and their fruits which we are now enjoying. Far less attention is paid in England to the commemoration of famous persons and of memorable days than in other countries possessing a less notable and less continuous history. It is typical that the birthdays of Cromwell, Chatham, and Pitt are accorded no popular recognition; and that, of many great soldiers and sailors, Nelson alone is immortal to the masses. The reason for this national forgetfulness may perhaps be found in a tendency to regard things only as they are at the present, which is sometimes termed common-sense, sometimes short-sighted folly. What is in the main just

part of the natural order of things as they may be expected to be in any well-managed society, and onsequently demanding nothing more than a nodding acquiescence. It is only when we are brought into contact with foreign views and foreign institutions that we properly realise the peculiarity and significance d

our own.

few

The common attitude of Englishmen towards our police system constitutes a striking example of this simple truth. On the whole we deem it to be efficient, and we do not feel it to be oppressive. The law and civil liberty are alike safeguarded and preserved. There are very reasonable men who would not endorse the verdict of the recent Royal Commission, whose Report is cited at the head of this article, that the police, whether in London or the provinces, are entitled to the confidence of all classes of the community.' In the prevention and detec tion of crime they are not surpassed by those of any other country; yet at the same time they are truly the servants of the whole body of citizens in an exact and literal sense. All this we recognise with satisfaction; e and, finding small ground for criticism, we do not take the trouble to enquire into the causes of a state of affairs which we have come to consider as natural and axiomatic. Yet the most cursory acquaintance with continental police methods will at once suggest that the combination of efficiency with a scrupulous regard for individual freedom is by no means as usual or as commonplace we suppose. Abroad we often find the policeman viewed, not as the guardian of the peace, but as a tyrannical and irksome functionary, more conscious of his own import ance than of his duty to protect society. He is invested with powers which frequently infringe or imperil the liberty of the individual, without obviously furthering the repression of crime; and the more closely his pecu liar characteristics are studied, the more patent to the English student does the wide divergence in theory and practice become, which divides his own from the foreign conception of police.

Once this divergence is perceived and its explanation sought, it becomes necessary to probe deeply into English history, into ages far more remote than that of Sir Robert Peel, whom so many are accustomed to regard as

The Lycurgus of our police system in England. For it is only by tracing the means adopted for conserving the eace from the most primitive times that the unique haracter of the modern powers and organisation of the police can be understood, and the true causes of their marked differences from all continental types discovered. Behind the constable of to-day there lies a long chain of historical development, based on notions, political and Social, which are derived from the dim ages of Germanic civilisation preceding the Norman Conquest; and it is only when this has been grasped that the causes of his efficiency, his popularity, and his success can be fully and adequately estimated.

The radical and essential features of the English conception of police, as contrasted with that of other nations, could not be better summed up than in the words of Dr Weidlich (p. 22):

The difference in principle which distinguishes the English from the continental police is that they are ordained, not for purposes of executive government in our sense, but for the purpose of the administration of criminal law and for the preservation of the peace-a conception which, even in the earliest times, had grown up out of that administration, and which, as inculcating the duty of preventing crime, still constitutes one of the central notions of English justice. Each individual member of the community bears a common responsibility for the preservation of the peace, and has been for centuries jointly liable, with all other members of tythings, hundreds, or counties, for the arrest and presentment to justice of his fellows in household or locality, and of any other evil-doer. Until the middle of last century this police duty was performed as an honorary office by the members of the parish in yearly rotation, and, even though powerful modern organisations have nowadays taken the place of these parish constables, the original Germanic conception of police service has yet survived. Now, as then, the police is the affair of the community, in which, in case of need, each member of the community must take a personal part, and the modern forces accordingly bear "a civilian and not military"

character.'

This passage is an admirable statement of the fundamental notion on which all measures for securing the peace in this country have been based for many centuries.