ABSTRACT
S Hortly after the publication of the Gladstone Report Sir Edmund du Cane, having reached the age of superannuation, retired, and for twenty-seven years Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise ruled in his place. In this long course of time the new Chairman, an Amurath to Amurath succeeding, established a personal position which makes it as natural to speak of the ‘Ruggles-Brise regime’ as of the ‘du Cane regime’ which preceded it. His mandate from Mr. Asquith was ‘that the views of the Committee should, as far as practicable, be carried into execution’, 1 and that mandate has descended, implicitly or explicitly, through successive Home Secretaries to successive Chairmen to this day. The words deserve a moment's study: the Home Secretary spoke not of the ‘recommendations’ of the Committee but of its ‘views’, and these, as we have seen, were diverse and radical; and in ‘as far as practicable’ is implicit the whole slow process of development over fifty years. The action possible to each generation is conditioned by the climate of opinion of its time and by the physical and financial resources at its disposal, as well as by the courage and faith of those called to ‘carry into execution’ views that could lead us still further than we have yet thought to go.
