river, sits the man upon whom the ultimate
responsibility for all this devolves, a slim-built, erect man of sixty
odd, with moustache once auburn but now grey, grey hair and shrewd hazel
eyes--Sir Edward Henry.

Imperturbable, quiet-voiced, quiet-mannered, he sits planning the peace
of London. He is playing a perpetual game of chess on the great board of
the metropolis with twenty thousand men as his pieces against a
cosmopolitan fraternity of evil-doers who never rest. He is the one man
in the service who must never make a mistake.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police sleeps on no bed of roses.
He must be as supple as willow, as rigid as steel, must possess the tact
of a diplomatist, with the impartiality of a judge.

Since the days when Sir Richard Mayne built up the police organisation
in its infancy, there has been no Commissioner who so nearly fulfils the
ideal of a great police administrator as Sir Edward Henry. Unlike most
of his predecessors, practically his whole life has been spent in the
study of police science.

It is something more than forty years ago since he entered the Indian
Civil Service as assistant magistrate collector. He became ultimately
Inspector-General of the Bengal Police, and then commissioner of a
division.

It was there that he first established the finger-print system of
identification, as a police device for the registration of habitual
criminals which he was to introduce later at Scotland Yard, and which
has tightened the meshes round many a criminal who would otherwise have
escaped justice.

The man in the street knows little of the silent man who is undoubtedly
the greatest police organiser in the world. Even on this very matter of
finger-prints there is a general confusion with Bertillonage--a totally
different thing. The Henry system has practically ousted Bertillonage in
every civilised country. If Sir Edward had done nothing but that he
would have ranked as one of the greatest reformers in criminal
detection. But he has done more--much more.

Fourteen years ago he resigned his Indian post to become
Assistant-Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation
Department. Even then the intention was to "try" him for Commissioner.
He spent a period in South Africa during the war reorganising the civil
police of Johannesburg and Pretoria. In 1903, when Sir Edward Bradford
retired, he was appointed Commissioner.

He found that the vast complex machinery of which he