and sometimes in altering, the Constitutions of the Dominions and Colonies; but there is no common Legislature chosen by all and acting for all in their common affairs. There is no joint system of finance of any kind.

The constitutional organs which serve equally the whole Empire are three first, the Monarchy, which is in form, and to a great extent in practice, the moving force of the whole system; second, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, containing representatives of the Dominions and of India, which acts as a Federal Court of Appeal; and third, the Imperial Conference, which, although possessing neither legislative nor executive power, greatly influences, by the resolutions it passes at its quadrennial meetings, the actions of the authorities it represents.

To these a fourth is in process of being added. The Committee of Imperial Defence is composed as a rule only of members of the executive of the United Kingdom, but the Prime Minister summons to its meetings, when occasion requires and opportunity offers, representatives of the Dominion Governments also. As those Governments recognise more fully their obligations to share the burdens of the common defence, the consultations about its organisation must become more regular, the attendance of Dominion representatives at the Committee of Imperial Defence is likely to become more constant, and it is probable that at no distant time that body will take rank as one of the Federal institutions of the Empire.

But when full allowance is made for these limited and tentative approaches to Federalism, the fact remains that, so far as the Empire possesses any supreme governing power at all, that power stands upon a basis bounded by the shores of Great Britain and Ireland. The great and rapidly growing populations of the oversea Dominions have no formal share in its sovereignty. The Constitution, such as it is, regards them as adjuncts, not as integral parts. They may be able to influence indirectly those who control, but they cannot themselves take part in the control. It is improbable that this can be the final form of the Empire's Constitution. The decentralisation which proceeded in the last century, and which was indispensable, is likely to be followed in this century by some form of concentration of the authority which has been diffused. The signs of the times show that here too there will be a movement towards the Federal type.

The creation, however, of a central authority chosen by the whole Empire and governing its common affairs would obviously be a task surrounded by the most formidable difficulties. The most important of the common interests is defence. Defence is largely a matter of finance. Is the Federal Parliament to have

powers of levying taxation in the United Kingdom and in the Dominions? If so, how are such powers to be enforced? What is to happen if one part of the Empire dissents from the legislation passed by the Federal Parliament? Is it possible to devise a Constitution in such a way that its laws should be operative only if the representatives of all the countries subject to it concur in their passing, or should be operative only in the territories of such of them as do concur?

Responsible to a Federal Parliament would be a Federal executive, dealing with foreign affairs, naval and military defence, and questions of trade. Could the statesmen drawn from the Dominions as members of such an executive be able at once to share at the centre in the conduct of its current business, and also to keep in sufficiently close touch with the countries from which they came to remain authoritative exponents of their views? What step can be contemplated if the representatives of one or two of the Dominions in the Federal Cabinet were to dissent from the policy of the rest, and, with the approval of their constituents, were to resign their posts? These are some of the problems with which Imperial Federation is confronted. No blunder could be worse than prematurely to attempt their solution before there is a general will to find a way.

John Stuart Mill and Freeman both recognise two classes of Federations-those in which the Federal power is chosen, not by the peoples, but by the Governments of the participating States, and acts only by making requisitions on those Governments, which they fulfil in whatever manner they think best; and secondly, those in which the Federal power acts directly on the citizens of the participating States, levies taxes upon them, and enforces, by its own executive action, the laws it enacts. All existing Federations are of this latter type. Professor Sidgwick, in his Elements of Politics, is inclined, indeed, to deny the title of Federation to the first category, and to relegate them to the class of Confederations. And Mill says of them that ' a union between the Governments only is a mere alliance, and subject to all the contingencies which render alliances precarious'; and that the only principle which has been found or which is ever likely to produce an effective Federal Government is that which allows the central authority, within the limits of its attributions, to make laws which are obeyed by every citizen individually, to execute them through its own officers, and to enforce them by its own tribunals.""

None the less it is interesting to note that Switzerland, the United States, and Germany have all, on the road to a more perfect Federation, passed through the stage of centralising 2 Mill Representative Government, p. 301

authority in the hands of a body formed by and acting through the Governments of the constituent States. It may be that the future holds in store a transitional Constitution of the same limited type for the British Empire also.

Two great discoveries in the sphere of government have been made by the British people, discoveries which have moulded the shape of the modern world. The first is the principle of representation. Unknown to the ancient States, it is this alone which has enabled order to be reconciled with liberty. The other is colonial self-government; and it is this alone which has enabled autonomy to be reconciled with unity. But the conditions of our day do not allow us to remain content with these two devices. Progress, Herbert Spencer says, is from simple to complex. The rule holds good for Constitutions. The need has arisen for systems of greater elaboration to be devised to fit the complexity of the problems with which we have to deal, in our own islands and beyond. In that development, there can be little doubt, such elements of Federalism as may suit the case will be brought in, to correct the present over-centralisation of the government of the United Kingdom, the under-centralisation of the government of the Empire.

HERBERT SAMUEL.

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW YORK

POLICE

AT two o'clock in the morning of the 16th of July, an hour when New York's nightly tide of pleasure' is just on the turn, and in front of the Hôtel Métropole, which stands just where the lights of Broadway are most numerous and brilliant, Herman Rosenthal, the proprietor of an up-town gambling den, was shot dead. The crime was committed with an audacity that local opinion promptly fastened upon as one of its most suspicious circumstances. Four men drove up to within fifteen yards of the hotel in a grey touring car; either a message was sent in to Rosenthal that a friend was waiting outside to see him, or the gang had reason to believe that he would shortly be starting homewards; as he passed down the lobby a confederate walked to the entrance and raised his hat as a signal; the four men got out of the motor, and when Rosenthal appeared on the side-walk emptied their revolvers into him. There were five or six policemen within a stone's throw, but none of them seems to have interfered with the murderers in any way; they regained the car without the least difficulty and disappeared down a side-street, easily giving the slip to the taxi in which one of the officers had started after them in tardy pursuit.

But the sensational character of the crime was quickly seen to be by no means its only feature of importance. Rosenthal was a well-known man in his profession, and shortly before his murder had been brought more than once into general notice. His establishment had been raided on the 15th of April, and to prevent its being reopened a police guard had been stationed in it ever since; and Rosenthal, cut off from his means of livelihood and filled with a bitter resentment against the police, had decided to turn informer and to reveal whatever he knew of the alliance between the police and the gamblers. A day or two before he was shot he had approached the District Attorney on the subject and had sworn to an affidavit, which was duly published in the papers, in which he specifically charged a police lieutenant named Becker with being his partner in the gambling house and receiving 20 per cent. of its profits; and on the very morning of his murder he was due to appear at the District

Attorney's private house-it was thought unsafe for him to go to the office-with the witnesses and proofs that would corroborate his statements. That Rosenthal had squealed' was known to the police, to the gambling fraternity, and to the public; and anyone familiar with the life and politics of New York's underworld could have foreseen that a crisis of some sort was being rapidly precipitated. Rosenthal himself had no doubt of the form the crisis would assume; he declared again and again that the police would 'get' him; and when the news came of his murder the people and papers of New York jumped unhesitatingly to the conclusion that the police had either perpetrated or instigated it. That in itself was highly revealing. The last suspicion that would have entered a Londoner's mind was the first that took possession of the man in the cars' in New York. With nothing but hearsay and circumstantial evidence to go upon, and with the clear alternative before him of believing that Rosenthal had been done to death by a gang of rival gamblers, the average New Yorker assumed almost as a matter of course that the real responsibility for the crime rested with the police, and that Rosenthal was one more victim of 'the system '-that is, of the organisation within the force that profits by complicity with criminals.

Popular suspicion turned at once towards Lieutenant Becker, the officer whom Rosenthal had accused of being his sleeping partner in the gambling business. Becker joined the force twenty-nine years ago. He was once implicated in shooting a boy during a burglar chase. In 1904 he received a medal for rescuing from the North River a man who, two years later, swore out an affidavit that he was an expert swimmer and had only fallen into the river at Becker's request and for the sum of fifteen dollars. In June 1911 Becker was placed in charge of what is known as the Strong Arm Squad, a special force of a hundred and fifty policemen whose business it is to raid gambling dens and arrest their proprietors. Last March a bullet fired by one of his men during a raid killed a man, and Becker for a while was relieved of his post. He was reinstated, however, in time to direct the raiding of Rosenthal's establishment in the middle of April; and there are, perhaps, some simple-minded persons who will ask why a police officer should raid a gambling den in which he is financially interested. To this there are several answers. He may have been ordered to do so by his official superiors and have had no option but compliance. He may have quarrelled with his partner and thought the opportunity a good one of asserting his power; or he may have grown dissatisfied with his share of the profits and have adopted this convincing method of proving that he was worth more. The immunity granted for a