But the courts and their judges are only one phase of the
law. No criminal can be brought before the bar until he has
been caught, and to apprehend him there must be another
great arm of legal administration, the police power. It is
with the final flowering of that police power, New Scotland
Yard, that this book primarily deals.

Sir Basil Thomson took charge of the administrative
branch of the Yard, the Criminal Investigation Depart-
ment, in June of 1913. The world, by comparison, was a
quiet place then, lightly sleeping, but Scotland Yard had
already won a world-wide reputation in its battle with crime.
It had its rivals--the more ancient Sûreté of Paris, slow
outgrowth of a French Charles's fourteenth-century detec-
tives; and the police departments of Berlin and Vienna--
but it was, and rightly, a magic name wherever English was
spoken. From difficult origins, from the antipathy of a free
people to whom any police were likely to be looked on as
an outrage, it had gathered a reputation with relentless
thoroughness. There were setbacks and discouragements;
there were defeats; even the writers who were later to cre-
ate a sort of specialized Balzacian Comédie Humaine around
the Yard and its inspectors were, toward the end of the last
century, taking the sort of pot shots at it which must have
reflected the public opinion of the day. Sherlock Holmes
had no truck with the Yard; to him Inspector Lestrade was
in the beginning little better than an ordinary flatfoot. In
later years Lestrade came off better, but he never grew to
be a really admirable figure. Of those times, less meagre in
achievement than in reputation, Sir Basil writes with sym-
pathy and understanding.

To put a finger on the exact moment when the feeling for
the Yard changed from distaste through tolerance to adula-
tion is impossible. Certainly by the turn of the century the
ugly and imposing building by the Thames, built of granite
quarried by the convicts at Dartmoor, had begun to fire
men's imaginations. Police were an old story by then, the
world was getting on, and eighteenth-century individualism
was little better than a memory; the romantic criminal, from

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