THE EMBUTE IN THE POLICE.
NOBODY comes very well out of this London Police ermeute except Mr. Ingham, the sitting Magistrate in Bow Street. He explained the law clearly and applied it firmly—but with moderation, while everybody else concerned appears more or less to have lost his head. The conduct of the Chief Commis- sioner or Deputy Commissioner in punishing Constable Good- child was, to say the least of it, exceedingly injudicious. Goodchild had been Secretary of the Committee of Delegates formed to represent the grievances of the men, had conducted their correspondence, and had taken a decided part in their agitation. That line of action considered by itself may have been right or wrong—a point to be determined according to the view taken by each reader of the degree of discipline necessary to the force—but in any case it was either quite right or quite wrong, an act of mutiny deserving immediate punishment, or a fair exercise of the usual privilege of employe's. The Police Authorities, by communicating with Goodchild, by retaining him in the force, and by granting the requests of which he was the expositor, put him entirely in the right, and should have carefully abstained from any manifestation of annoyance at his victory. Instead of that, they transferred him from one central Division to another at the extremity of the jurisdiction, obviously in order to weaken his influence and diminish his standing among his comrades. In other words, they courted a conflict with their men upon the one sub- ject on which, as every man familiar with Trades' Unions knows, no combination of employes either will or can give way. They will not, because the discouragement of the leaders is fatal to any organisation ; and they cannot, because submission in such a ease rouses the instinctive and most useful horror of social treachery felt by all Englishmen, policemen included. It was a direct challenge to a large body of men to abandon leaders whom they had selected, who had won the battle for them, and who were consequently entitled to their best thanks. The men should either have been treated as soldiers who are to obey orders in silence till their term is up, or have been treated as employes with a right, on fulfilment of their con- tracts, to ask for better terms. The order was oppressive as well as unwise, and as usual, the superiors having erred, the inferiors began to imitate their example. Goodchild had no kind of moral right to disobey the order transferring him to another Division, or to incite his comrades to resistance ; and his comrades had no right to refuse for his sake or any other cause to go on duty. We are quite willing to believe their bona fides, that they honestly thought themselves as free to strike as workmen in a factory ; but they were not, for a reason which, if we could but convince Englishmen of its justice, would remove half the difficulties in all the services of the State. The obligation to serve the State faithfully, to promote its interests and resist its enemies, is as imperative on the private as the officer. Everybody recognises this in the case of the officer, but nobody not in command recog- nises it in the case of the private. Colonel Henderson has a legal right to resign when he pleases, but suppose him in the midst of an eineute, or a great fire, or an epidemic of mur- der; to refuse to act, to decline to give orders unless his pay were enlarged, or to go to bed in the sulks, what—we put it to the men themselves—would be the general verdict ? That it was a great pity the Colonel was not liable to be tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to some punishment heavier than dismissal. The men did the precise thing we have imagined the Colonel to do,—refused, that is, to do their clear duty just when it was most necessary,—and were just as much in the wrong as they in the ease supposed would have unanimously pronounced their chief to be. Their course was to send in their resignations, avowedly because they considered Mr. Goodchild an oppressed man, but to go cheer- fully to work until their legal notices had expired, and they could resign without inflicting sudden and wilful injury on the wholly innocent community. In the next step the Authorities were again in the wrong. It is impossible to perceive the justice of singling out one man out of ninety for punish- ment, when that man had done nothing but what the rest did, had been in no sense a ringleader in the actual outbreak, and had not been especially offensive in his breach of discipline. It was admitted in Court that Brown was as passive in his disobedience on Monday as his com- rades, and that he had been selected for punishment because he had been a delegate,—that is, because he had helped to make a representation which Mr. Bruce allowed to be just. Even when a regiment is decimated for mutiny, the men are chosen by lot, not by an individual will, which even if guided by a sincere desire for justice, must always under such circumstances seem capricious. All ought to have been punished, or ringleaders ought to have been selected as ringleaders in the insubordination, or all ought to have been pardoned. Instead of that, the Authorities singled out for pro- secution the one man they should have let alone, because in his case only could their fairness be suspected, and he would, but for Mr. Ingham's moderation, have been sentenced to a month's hard labour. Indeed, Colonel Henderson him- self admits this, for so far as he can act without the interven- tion of the Courts, he has punished all alike, suspending all the men who refused to go on duty, an act of firmness required by circumstances which, as the example of the City shows us, would, but for mismanagement, never have occurred. In the City, where discipline is at least as strict as in the Metropoli- tan District, Colonel Fraser has met the men in the kindliest spirit, and, without surrendering his authority in the least, has encouraged them to state plainly any grievanoes under which they imagine themselves to labour.
The incident will pass, but its lesson will not, we trust, be forgotten by the Government. It is quite evident that the London Police, upon which we are dependant for the safety of the capital, is not in a satisfactory state, that the men do not respect their officers, and that the tone of the whole body has been perceptibly lowered since the death of Sir Richard Mayne. The men themselves say this is the result of insufficient pay, but the pay under the revised rules does not seem to be unusually low. The work is very hard, the exposure is very great, and the personal risk, the risk of being maimed on service, is very much beyond the risk incurred by soldiers in time of peace ; but after all, 24s. a week, with "a rise" in constant prospect, is very much better pay than the soldiers obtain, is, in fact, good pay for men whose work is in so great a degree bodily labour alone. It might be expedient to pay experienced men a little more than they are paid, so as to make promotion from the ranks less of an object of desire, but 24s. a week and a " chance " will undoubtedly attract a sufficient number of candidates for employment. The serjeants say the cause is the absence of sufficiently certain hopes of promotion, and rules of pension, and this no doubt may, in part at all events, be true. The English system of granting pensions only when men are superannuated is always disheartening, and the passion for "getting on" is rising to a great height among us, and must be gratified in the Police as well as in any other service, if men are to remain in it contentedly. But there is evidently some source of weakness in the force other than the desire for more pay or better opportunities, or there would not be so danger- ous a readiness to resort to extreme measures. Nobody seems to believe that an appeal would be of any use. Goodchild is presumably a man of intelligence, or he would not be accepted as a leader by his comrades ; yet Goodchild when punished, or under an impression that he is punished unjustly, disobeys the order instead of appealing against it, as a man confident in his superiors would have been apt to do. The men who sympathised with him, instead of expressing their sympathy and hoping for redress, struck at once, as if under the idea that the only way to extort justice was to make themselves unpleasant to those whose duty it was to dispense it. We shall be told that is the way with workmen everywhere, but even if that were true, it is not the way with Services, which are distinguished from Trades mainly in this, that they are governed by laws, rules, customs, or, it may be, etiquettes which render individual will or caprice or incapacity com- paratively of minor importance. No service is in a healthy state, in which the lowest man, if convinced rightly or wrongly that he is in the right, despairs of the result of an appeal, and either submits to the oppression, or casts about for some illegal means of making his suffer- ings felt. It is not in a well-governed ship that men grow insolent, or that bits of iron fall from the tops, or that officers take counsel as to the most expedient method of avert- ing mutiny. There is always in such cases, as the Admiralty well knows, "something wrong on quarter-deck," either too much severity, or too much laxity, or too much "finicking," —of all forms of incapacity the one which most annoys sub- ordinates,—and on the face of the evidence there is something wrong in the Police force. We do not even pretend to know what is wrong, but we do know that we had nothing of this spirit exhibited while Sir R. Mayne was in com- mand; that Colonel Henderson has been officially defended in Parliament for residing out of London—though not, of course, out of his jurisdiction—and that the public opinion of the men as manifested at the delegates' meetings, in the correspondence, in the papers, and in the police court on Tuesday, indicates an irritable sense of pettiness in their superiors, precisely the fault displayed in the removal of Goodchild and the singling out of Brown. The men are not fools. They know perfectly that the remedy of their pecuniary grievances does not rest with their own officers, and if they were in a good state would behave like anyother regiment under hard- ship, that is, would wait quitecheerfully, and with thorough good- feeling in all ranks, for its removal, or for the decision that it must still be borne. A ship's crew can be thoroughly dis- contented with its pay and thoroughly confident in it sofficers at the same time, and so can a regiment of Police, and, indeed, that is at this very moment the position of half the bodies of county constabulary throughout England. The best Superintendent cannot keep his men together, they are so insufficiently paid ; but a good one always contrives to make them, while they remain, efficient, submissive, and contented.
This apparent dissatisfaction with their officers and want of confidence in their sympathy and sense of justice, is the more important just now, because it is almost fatal to the idea, other- wise attractive, of giving a stricter constitution to the force. There is no valid reason that we know of why the London Police should not be as strictly organised as the Royal Constabulary of Ireland, why light sentences should not be inflicted on the authority of the officers themselves, or why the new men should not be bound under penalties to abstain from combina- tion, resignation after a quarter's notice being left the only legal method of avoiding duty. Such a change might be beneficial to the men themselves, as they would then be carefully heard before punishment, it would limit as well as define the authority of their officers, and it would increase their esprit de corps, while it would protect the com- munity against a danger which it is of course possible to exaggerate, but which must still be very serious. London could be kept in order for a few days just as readily as a camp could, and by the same means—that is, by patrols of picked soldiers or marines—but the thieves would have a glorious
time of it, and all judicial arrangements would go suddenly out of gear. But it is impossible to support, or even to discuss, such an innovation while officers and men remain in a hostile or even suspicious attitude, while the fairness of sentences might be questioned, or while there is the slightest want of confidence in the judgment as well as the zeal and ability of the general in command. If we are to silence all complaints in the Police as we do in the Army and Navy, we must be perfectly certain, as we are in the Army and Navy, that a remediable grievance will be investigated with a strong desire that it should be removed. Otherwise we may find ourselves in presence of a movement beside which a strike is unimportant, a steady disinclination on the part of all decent citizens to enter the Police on any terms.
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