and most barbaric forms of justice. The wild tribe of the Bhils, and the sons of the ravening Beloochi are among the men whom we have gradually persuaded to clothe themselves in that sober uniform which symbolises the order born of strict, stable, and humanising government. Now is not this alone a rather great thing to have done in the course of half a century? Consider the many hundreds of years that passed in our own country before out of Hue and Cry we evolved the garbed and disciplined "peeler of Sir Robert Peel. Consider that in Shakespeare's day no visitor in London could safely stroll half a mile from his inn after nightfall. Consider that in the time of Horace Walpole (who was himself held up one evening in Hyde Park) your thriving highwayman, after sipping his chocolate and throwing a main at White's, would mount his roadster and jog down St. James's Street and Piccadilly, with a notion of robbing the mail on the outskirts of Kensington. Why, in all London we had no police worthy to be so called until within a brief space of the accession of Queen Victoria !

Now, the transformation witnessed almost instantaneously in London on the passing of Peel's Act, was in all respects less striking, and infinitely less tremendous than the change effected within a very few years in India by the mere sight of a quantity of uniformed native policemen,

who had Dacoity (in some cases unquestionably Thuggee) in their very blood and bones. I repeat that there was something really great in this. It was an achievement for the parcel of Whites who had taken on them to administer this alien horde of the innumerable diverse and inharmonious peoples of India. Beyond a doubt this police force" owes it success, not to the favourable nature of the soil for the growth of this imported plant, but to the organisation of its English rulers and their genius for establishing law and order."

But now we are also to remember that a police force composed of and largely directed by natives would necessarily be long in re-shaping or modifying feelings, sympathies, prejudices, bred and nurtured in its individual members. An Indian policeman is still an Indian, and on many subjects he will doubtless during many years continue to think-and be morally swayed-as an Indian. To put it as Sir Edmund Cox does: "In India allowances must be made for the material that we have to deal with, and the Oriental traditions that cannot be eradicated in a generation, or even in a century." In a word, we must still be prepared to spend a great deal of time and give ourselves a great deal of trouble over the task of inducing the Indian policeman to regard the business of policing from our own best point of view. I am disposed to think (and though Sir

Edmund would naturally encourage me in this, let me at once say that he is generous towards the critics of the system he was so long and honourably identified with) that what is worst in the Indian policeman has received, at any rate, as much attention as is called for, and that his successes in an undertaking which must originally have appealed to his natural sense of the absurd have been somewhat unduly withdrawn from notice. Is he given to lying in Court? If there be anything in the meridian he was born under, it would be odd if he were not. Is he open to a bribe? His meridian is again a factor. Has he still some natural proneness to the crime he is set to investigate? There may be cousins on both sides of the family with whom crime is an hereditary calling-they are reared in it in India, generation by generation, as boys with us are dedicated to grocery or the Church. Has he had a fondness for extracting confessions from his prisoners by torture? Doubtless; but think of the secrets that must have travelled to remotest Indian villages of the fun that rajahs had in squeezing pepper into the eyes of naughty female slaves.

It is scarcely to be questioned that the Indian police has earned in recent years what in Ireland is called a misfortunate reputation. The Government of India said, in the resolution already cited :

"The traditions of the force are native, and, it may be added, so are the traditional beliefs regarding it. If an ideal police could be called into existence to-morrow, it would be regarded as corrupt until it had lived down its popular reputation."

Well, let us take it that the ideal police force in India is still to be created. I have attempted to show, by suggestion, that this will be difficult; but have the readers of the report of Lord Curzon's Commission realised that there are many districts in which the system seems to be realising what was hoped of it? We want in every district the most tactful, intelligent, and thoughtful Englishmen at the head of the concern. Is there a man who is slack in his work, careless of it, unmindful of his responsibility in the midst of many conflicting interests? In this man's little piece of the department there will always be cause of complaint. Is there an alert, patient, conscientious, and kindly man at the post? In his little piece of the department there will be fewer offences charged to the native policeman.

PRISONERS PAROLED

IN their degrees of improvement the Prison Commissioners have got to the notion of parole. It is an excellent notion, of course, and cheering. Confidence begets confidence, in prison as in spheres where the rule is apt to be less harbitry."

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Concerning a pleasing little scheme of their own, recently begun at the new Preventive Detention Prison, Camp Hill, the Commissioners observe: "The system is a new and bold experiment, to which, we believe, no actual analogy exists in any civilised country." The assumption is altogether too splendid. There is nothing in the least "new" in the paroling of prisoners, "in nor have results proved the experiment to be a particularly "bold" one. Almost wherever the authorities of prison have ventured to substitute trust for distrust, they have been encouraged to go one better in the matter. Even in the early days of Botany Bay, when authority was very sorely hampered and beset, numbers of prisoners were practically enlarged on parole in the act of descending from the convict ship. America is paroling prisoners "all the time," and sometimes