All Rounders The list of extraneous duties which a committee,
after study- ing the subject for three years, has now recommended that the police should be relieved of is long and varied. The supervision of sheep-dipping, the washing of corpses in mortuaries, the licensing of shoe-blacks, the inspection of sea- men's lodging houses—the number of miscellaneous things they are at present required to do (and to know something about) is astonishing. The streets of the Welfare State are paved with an intricate mosaic of regulations, and the duty of enforcing them seems often to have been laid on the police because there was nobody else to lay it on. I think it is a great tribute to the force that it has, in carrying out these duties, attracted none of the odium reserved for those luckless myrmidons of the planners—the snooper and the "man from the ministry." The report makes no mention of what, a generation ago, was widely regarded as one of a policeman's extraneous duties; I suppose there are no cooks left to kiss in the kitchens of the middle class.
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