Without asserting that parish constables were altogether hopeless, it may be said without fear of contradiction that only the strictest discipline could have sufficed to render them efficient; but the sole punishment a superintending constable could inflict on a refractory subordinate was the very mild one of reporting him to the Justices, who, in their turn, were powerless to administer anything like adequate correction. To expect a parochial constabulary to learn efficiency voluntarily from a superintending constable living in their midst, was as unreasonable as it would be to look for knowledge in a schoolroom where a scholar without authority is the teacher.
Whilst this want of control was the chief element of weakness, it was not the only fault of the system under consideration. For effectual action, responsibility should be centred if possible in the hands of one individual, or at all events not equally divided between a dozen or more participants; yet in counties where the system of superintending constables obtained, there was no uniformity or general plan, but the officer of each petty sessional division took his own line, and as long as he put in an appearance at the Sessions, and visited the various parishes of his district once a fortnight, no one interfered with him, or directed his method. It was the custom for the county to provide each superintending constable with a horse and cart, but, even with this convenience, the districts were frequently too large for any one man to supervise; in Kent, for example, a certain division contained as many as fifty-six different parishes, whilst in Northumberland the normal area of a single police district was about three hundred square miles.
Despite its obvious defects, the system was popular: not on account of any hidden virtue which it may perhaps have possessed, but simply because the small initial outlay required to start it made it look cheap: opposition to the alternative system, on the other hand, though it assumed many garbs, had its root and origin in the false economy which hopes to avoid paying for the measure of security which it knows to be indispensable.
The pioneer county, as far as stipendiary police is concerned, was Cheshire, where a paid constabulary was already ten years old when the Permissive Act was passed.
At the time of the formation of the metropolitan police, Sir Robert Peel was anxious to make trial of a similar organization in the country. His efforts were successful in so far that he obtained the necessary parliamentary sanction[210] and induced the County Palatine of Chester to appoint an experimental force; once established, however, he was unable to exercise any control over its destinies, and the first rural police developed along lines never intended by its author.
The only point of similarity between the Metropolitan and the Cheshire Constabularies was that they were both stipendiary bodies; the county was divided into nine police districts, six of which were identical with existing Hundreds; each district was under the supervision of a High-Constable, assisted by from six to eight petty constables. The whole scheme, therefore, was conceived on a paltry scale; the petty constables were not selected with sufficient care, they were not graded, and they wore no uniform; responsibility was not vested in the hands of any one man, and internal jealousies rendered impossible that co-operation, which is so necessary to the efficiency of the whole.[211] One of the reasons why Cheshire was selected as a trial ground, was because rural crime was more prevalent in that county than elsewhere; but although some lessons of value were acquired for future application, as a result of this experiment, it must be confessed that the Cheshire Constabulary were hardly more successful in preventing crime than the parish constables had been.
Among those counties which were wise enough to take immediate advantage of the Permissive Act, the lead was quickly taken by Essex, which had the good fortune to entrust the control of its rural police to a really brilliant chief-constable in the person of Captain M'Hardy, a retired naval officer, who had already done good work for the Coast-guard service. Taking "efficiency with economy" for his motto, Captain M'Hardy was able to achieve results which proved that a really well-managed force could be made self-supporting, or in other words that an efficient constabulary saves and earns as much as it costs. The strength of the rural police in Essex averaged about one constable to every fifteen hundred of the population, and the gross expenses, which included the erection and maintenance of suitable station-houses, were from the first considerable; yet the chief-constable claimed that the net annual cost of the whole establishment was only £80, 6s. 3d. This sum is surprisingly small, but not so incredible as, at first sight, it may appear. The figures (which are printed at length in an Appendix to the 2nd Report of the Select Committee appointed in 1853) were arrived at by placing on the debit side of the account the gross amount expended for all police services, and on the credit side, the total savings and earnings effected by their agency. The largest credit taken was an item of five thousand pounds odd on account of the decrease of vagrancy, and the second largest, one of nearly four thousand pounds on account of the estimated increase in the value of land, calculated at the rate of only one penny per acre.[212]
The practical difference between the working of the parochial system and that of the rural police could find no better illustration than that afforded by a comparison of the extent of vagrancy respectively existing under the two systems. Formerly parish-constables served at a loss unless crime was plentiful, and their interest therefore lay towards the encouragement rather than in the prevention of offences. It is not suggested that parish constables, as a class, were in the habit of deliberately manufacturing crime, but instances not infrequently came to light which proved that such practices were not so exceptional as they ought to have been. We have it on the authority of the Vagrancy Commission, that a regular system of fraudulent collusion between constables and tramps was common as recently as the year 1820.[213] It appears that at this time parish constables were entitled to ten shillings for apprehending a vagrant, upon proof being shown that the latter had either solicited or received money, and the fraud consisted in a compact between the two by which the constable first gave the vagrant a penny, and having arrested him as a beggar, claimed the reward, which was ultimately divided between the conspirators.
Under the rural police system such a state of affairs was impossible. Constables were paid a regular salary, and had no interest in crime except to prevent it by every means in their power: prevalence of crime in any district meant extra work and less chance of promotion for every policeman concerned.
Of the many excellent arrangements introduced by Captain M'Hardy, with a view to reducing the expense of the Essex constabulary, none was so successful as the plan of employing constables as assistant relieving officers for casuals. The resulting advantage was twofold. The prospect of having to interview a policeman acted as a moral check upon vagrancy, and the constable acquired in this way an extensive and first-hand acquaintance with the members of a fraternity professionally interesting to him. The success of this experiment, with which was associated the supervision of low lodging-houses, astonished even its strongest adherents; a comparison of the vagrancy returns for 1848 and 1849 (the year of the initiation of this policy) shewing a decrease amounting to ninety per cent. in the number of indoor, and to seventy-seven per cent. in the number of outdoor vagrants, the gross figures being 24,882 for 1848, and 2977 for the following year—this result was achieved, moreover, without relief being refused, as far as could be discovered, to a single pauper who was really destitute.[214]