I know people, old
people, I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of
freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original
policemen had been started with the present helmets, the result might
have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and
the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed
over the very modern love of PERFECT peace and order. The old notion
that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our
imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and
intellectual moments we well know it is not. Nor is it merely our
history which produces this effect; we might get over that; but the
results of that history co-operate. Our double Government so acts: when
we want to point the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the
jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of
constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen,
in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that
it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as
something NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very
nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as
the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.

Out of the same history and the same results proceed our tolerance of
those "local authorities" which so puzzle many foreigners. In the
struggle with the Crown these local centres served as props and
fulcrums. In the early Parliaments it was the local bodies who sent
members to Parliament, the counties, and the boroughs; and in that way,
and because of THEIR free life, the Parliament was free too. If active
real bodies had not sent the representatives, they would have been
powerless. This is very much the reason why our old rights of suffrage
were so various; the Government let whatever people happened to be the
strongest in each town choose the members. They applied to the electing
bodies the test of "natural selection"; whatever set of people were
locally strong enough to elect, did so. Afterwards in the civil war,
many of the corporations, like that of London, were important bases of
resistance. The case of London is typical and remarkable. Probably, if
there is any body more than another which an educated Englishman
nowadays regards with little favour, it is the Corporation of London.
He connects it with hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with lar