66

stuffed, and attached to the hand that works, The false hand and the left are clasped in a natural manner outside his coat or cloak. The lady's conversation grows more interesting, and the traveller becomes absorbed. If he has a momentary fear that his pocket is being tampered with, he is reassured on perceiving that his neighbour has fallen asleep, with his hands folded before him. Presently the accomplice is the recipient of a silent and invisible sign. The 99 touch has been brought off. And now the essential thing is the transfer of the prize from the thief to his partner. The thief himself must be able at all cost to quit the carriage with no stolen article upon him; suspicion hardly ever glances at the woman. Between a a pair of first-rate performers the transfer is effected with a dexterity that baffles observation. If the purse, watch, or pocket-book cannot be passed through an outer garment of the accomplice, the right thing to do is to let it glide to the floor. The woman then seizes it with her feet and jerks it up between her knees, reaching there for it with the hand that drops it into a deep pocket of the cloak, dress, or petticoat.

There is nothing now but to make an easy exit at the next stopping-place. The thief leaves the train in advance of his companion, though at this stage it is she who carries their earnings. A minute or so after the man has gone, the

accomplice snatches up some article he has left on the seat or in the rack, and exclaiming that "the gentleman must not lose this!" makes her speedy exit. Before the train has started again they should both be out of sight.

POLICE

I

66

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FORCE

91

IN Anglo-Saxon times we were all policemen. Every person was responsible in some degree for maintaining peace and order in his own little corner of the country. This was no bad plan. The King himself was head constable, and under the name of the King's Peace he "guaranteed, or at least promised, to his subjects, a state of peace and security in return for the allegiance which he demanded from them." Our earliest police system, as far as it might be so called, was organised largely on a basis of land tenure. Under the King, the thane was chiefly responsible, and freemen not possessing freeholds formed themselves into tythings. The inhabitants of ten homesteads constituted a tything; their headborough, chosen by election, was their representative, and responsible for his section of the community. Out of the tything grew

1 A History of Police in England. By Captain W. L Melville Lee.

the hundred, a group of ten tythings, under an appointed head. These were the official police, so to speak; and in addition to these bodies there were in all the principal towns the voluntary associations known as peace-guilds, whose object was the mutual assurance of their members. Captain Melville Lee, whose well-packed and well-ordered essay, A History of Police in England, I am laying under contribution, reminds us that during many centuries the Hue and Cry "remained the only practical agency for the pursuit and capture of delinquents. But it was an effective agency in its way, for when the headborough raised the cry every one must join in the hunt. The labourer must quit the field, the cobbler leave his stall, the merchant abandon his office; and if the person " wanted " were not arrested in his own tything, the headborough of the next district must continue the chase, which might last until the sea were reached -unless, of course, the hunted man had succeeded in taking sanctuary. It was a rough and ready method, and the whole system was rough and ready. Watch and Ward was the chief means of protection in cities; gates to be shut between sunset and daybreak, and no one allowed to live in the suburbs "except under the guarantee of a responsible householder." Penal enactments were almost entirely preventive; there was little idea of reforming the culprit, and little

of deterring others. The present-day philosophy of punishment is a very modern growth. “If a man was killed, it was either to satisfy the blood feud or to remove him out of the way as a wild beast would be destroyed; if a man was mutilated by having his forefinger cut off or branded with a red-hot iron on the brow, it was done, not so much to give him pain as to make him less expert in his trade of thieving, and to put upon him an indelible mark by which all men should know that he was no longer a man to be trusted." The famous Statute of Winchester, of Edward I's reign, seems a link between two extreme ideas of police duty-between the policies of prevention and of repression. "Watch and Ward," says Captain Lee, was the civil equivalent of the sentry who, in time of war, is posted outside the camp, and whose functions are purely preventive; whilst Hue and Cry was partly preventive and partly repressive."

66

Under the third Edward we have the petty constable acting as the servant of the justice of the peace, and this officer gradually deprived the sheriff of his judicial powers, until, in Edward IV's reign, his status was very much that of the justice of the peace at the present day. It is to be understood that the constable was at first and for long an unpaid officer, an amateur so to say, whose services were given for the benefit of the community, and whose position was of