of the city, is the most important in the United States. It included | Chalancon (not to be confused with the barons of Chalançon in in 1910 a commissioner appointed by the mayor and exercising a wide range of authority; four deputy commissioners; a chief inspector, who has immediate charge of the force and through whom all orders are issued; he is assisted by 18 inspectors, who are in charge of different sections of the city, and who carry out the orders of the chief; 87 captains, each of whom is in direct charge of a precinct; 583 sergeants; and last of all, the ordinary policemen, or patrolmen, as they are often called from the character of their duties. There is a separate branch, the detective bureau, composed of picked men, charged with the investigation and, still more, the prevention of crime. The total number of patrol men in 1909 was 8562. Appointments are for life, with pensions in case of disability and after a given number of years of service. LITERATURE.-Patrick Colquhoun, Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1796); Pierre Clement, La Police sous Louis XIV. (1866); Maxime Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie (1869-1875); Dr Norman Chevers, Indian Medical Jurisprudence (Calcutta, 1870); A. T. Crawford, Reminiscences of an Indian Police Official (1894); C. R. W. Hervey, Records of Indian Crime (1892); Arthur Griffiths, Mysteries of Police and Crime (1903); Captain W. L. Melville Lee, A History of Police in England (Methuen, 1901); Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government (Longmans, 1906-1908); article by H. B. Simpson, "The Office of Constable,' in the English Historical Review (October_1895); F. W. Maitland, Justice and Police (Macmillan, 1885); L. F. Fuld, Police Administration (New York, 1910). (A. G.) " POLICE COURTS, courts of summary jurisdiction, held in London and certain large towns of the United Kingdom by specially appointed and salaried magistrates. They were originally called "public offices" (Middlesex Justices Act 1792), but after the establishment of the police force, in 1829, they came to be called " police offices," although no change had taken place in their nature. They are so described in a report of a select committee which inquired into the system in 1837 and 1838; in the same report the magistrates who presided in the courts were first described as police magistrates." Police offices were first officially described by their modern title in the Metropolitan Police Courts Act 1839. In 1839 there were nine police courts; since 1792 there had been three magistrates to each court, and the act of 1839 retained twenty-seven as the maximum number at any time (s. 2). In 1835 unsalaried justices ceased to sit in the police courts along with the paid magistrates. The Metropolitan Police Courts Act 1840 gave power to map out the whole of the metropolitan police district into police court divisions, and to establish police courts wherever necessary, the artificial limit of twenty-seven magistrates being at the same time preserved. Additional courts have from time to time been established by orders in council, and in 1910 there were in London fourteen courts with twenty-five magistrates. Their divisions are regulated by orders in council of 1903 and 1905; the nine original courts are Bow Street, Westminster, Marylebone, Marlborough Street, Worship Street, Clerkenwell, Thames, Tower Bridge and Lambeth. The courts are held every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Sunday, Christmas Day, Good Friday or any day appointed for a public fast or thanksgiving or bank holiday. The Greenwich and Woolwich court, which comprises one division, is held at Greenwich in the morning and at Woolwich in the afternoon. The chief magistrate (sitting at Bow Street) receives a salary of £1800 a year and the other magistrates £1500 each. The magistrates are appointed by the Crown; they must have been practising barristers for seven years or stipendiary magistrates for some place in England or Wales. One police magistrate has the same powers as two justices, but may not act in anything which has to be done at special or petty sessions of all the justices acting in the division or at quarter sessions. He can do alone when sitting in a police court any act which any justice or justices can do under the Indictable Offences Act 1848, or under the Summary Jurisdiction Act; he has special powers under the Metropolitan Police Courts Act 1839, and is also given special powers under certain other acts. The Bow Street court has jurisdiction in extradition. The precedent of appointing salaried magistrates was followed for certain towns in the provinces by particular acts, and in 1863 the Stipendiary Magistrates Act gave power to towns and boroughs of 25,000 inhabitants and upwards to obtain a stipendiary magistrate. POLIGNAC, an ancient French family, which had its seat in the Cevennes near Puy-en-Velay (Haute Loire). Its authentic pedigree can be traced to the 9th century, but in 1421 the male line became extinct. The heiress married Guillaume, sire de Vivarais), who assumed the name and arms of Polignac. The first to 66 nances which were the immediate cause of the revolution of July 1830. On the outbreak of this he fled for his life, but, after wandering for some time among the wilds of Normandy, was arrested at Granville. His trial before the chamber of peers resulted in his condemnation to perpetual imprisonment (at Ham), but he benefited by the amnesty of 1836, when the sentence was commuted to one of exile. During his captivity he wrote Considérations politiques (1832). He afterwards spent some years in England, but finally was permitted to re-enter France on condition that he did not take up his abode in Paris. He died at St Germain on the 29th of March 1847. POLIGNY, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Jura, 18 m. N. N. E. of Lons-le-Saunier on the Paris-Lyons railway. Pop. (1906), 3756. The town lies in the valley of the Glantine at the base of a hill crowned by the ruins of the old castle of Grimont, once the repository of the archives of the county of Burgundy. The church of Montivillard, its most remarkable building, dates in the oldest portions from the 12th century, its chief features being a Romanesque tower and reredos of the Renaissance period. Amongst the other old buildings of the town, the church of St Hippolyte, of the first half of the 15th century, and a convent-church serving as corn market are of some interest. The tribunal of first instance belonging to the arrondissement is at Arbois. Poligny has a sub-prefecture, a communal college and a school of dairy instruction. Under the name of Polemniacum the town seems to have existed at the time of the Roman occupation. POLISH SUCCESSION WAR (1733-1735), the name given to a war which arose out of the competition for the throne of Poland between the elector August of Saxony, son of August II. (the Strong), and Stanislaus Leszcynski, the king of Poland installed thirty years before by Charles XII. of Sweden and displaced by August the Strong when Charles's projects collapsed. The claims of Stanislaus were supported by France, Spain and Sardinia, those of the Saxon prince by Russia and the empire, the local quarrel being made the pretext for the settlement of minor outstanding claims of the great powers amongst themselves. The war was therefore a typical 18th century war with a limited object," in which no one but the cabinets and the professional armies were concerned. It was fought on two theatres, the Rhine and Italy. The Rhine campaigns were entirely unimportant, and are remembered only for the last appearance in the field of Prince Eugène and Marshal Berwick-the latter was killed at the siege of Philippsburg—and the baptism of fire of the young crown prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick the Great. In Italy, however, there were three hard-fought though indecisive battles, Parma (June 29, 1734), Luzzara (Sept. 19, 1734) and Bitonto (May 25, 1735), the first and last won by the Austrians, the second by the French and their allies. In Poland itself, Stanislaus, elected king in September 1733, was soon expelled by a Russian army and was afterwards besieged in Danzig by the Russians and Saxons (Feb.-June 1733). POLITIAN (1454-1494). Angelo Ambrogini, known in literary annals as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus from his birthplace, was born at Montepulciano in Tuscany on the 14th of July 1454. His father, Benedetto, a jurist of good family and distinguished ability, was murdered by political antagonists for adopting the cause of Piero de' Medici in Montepulciano; and this circumstance gave his eldest son, Angelo, a claim on the family of Medici. At the age of ten the boy came to prosecute his studies at Florence, where he learned Latin under Cristoforo Landino, and Greek under Argyropulos and Andronicos Kallistos. From Marsilio Ficino he imbibed the rudiments of philosophy. The precocity of his genius for scholarship and poetry was early manifested. At thirteen years of age he began to circulate Latin letters; at seventeen he sent forth essays in Greek versification; at eighteen he published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won for himself the title of Homericus juvenis by translating four books of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de' Medici, who was then the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy, took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his children, and secured him a distinguished post in the university of Florence. Before he reached the age of thirty, Poliziano expounded the humanities with almost unexampled lustre even for that epoch of brilliant professors. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe, the men who were destined to carry to their homes the spolia opima of Italian culture. Not to mention Italians, it will suffice to record the names of the German Reuchlin, the English Grocyn and Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras. Poliziano had few advantages of person to recommend him. He was ungainly in form, with eyes that squinted, and a nose of disproportionate length. Yet his voice was rich and capable of fine modulation; his eloquence, ease of utterance and copious stream of erudition were incomparable. It was the method of professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors with their class, dictating philological and critical notes, emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offering elucidations of the matter, and pouring forth stores of acquired knowledge regarding the laws, manners, religious and philosophical opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during the years of his professorship, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and the writers of Augustan histories. He also undertook a recension of the text of the Pandects of Justinian, which formed the subject of one of his courses; and this recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criticism of the Roman code. At the same time he was busy as a translator from the Greek. His versions of Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch's Eroticus and Plato's Charmides delighted contemporaries by a certain limpid fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which distinguished him also as an original writer. Of these learned labours the most universally acceptable to the public of that time were a series of discursive essays on philology and criticism, first published in 1489 under the title of Miscellanea. They had an immediate, a lasting and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply professorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. The Manto, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil; the Ambra, which contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape, and a studied eulogy of Homer; the Rusticus, which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or scholastic spirit; and the Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry-these are the masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an authenticity of inspiration, a sincerity of feeling, and a command of metrical resources which mark them out as original productions of poetic genius. rather than as merely professorial lucubrations. Exception may be taken to their style, when compared with the best work of the Augustan or even of the Silver age. But what renders them always noteworthy to the student of modern humanistic literature is that they are in no sense imitative or conventional, but that they convey the genuine thoughts and emotions of a born poet in Latin diction and in metre moulded to suit the characteristics of the singer's temperament. Poliziano was great as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the representative hero of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated paganism to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet. Between Boccaccio and Ariosto, no single poet in the mother tongue of Italy deserves so high a place as Poliziano. What he might have achieved in this department of literature had he lived at a period less preoccupied with humanistic studies, and had he found a congenial sphere for his activity, can only be guessed. As it is, we must reckon him as decidedly the foremost and indubitably the most highly gifted among the Italian poets who obeyed Lorenzo de' Medici's demand for a resuscitation of the vulgar literature. Lorenzo led the way himself, and Poliziano was more a follower in his path than an initiator. Yet what Poliziano produced, impelled by a courtly wish to satisfy his patron's whim, proves his own immeasurable superiority as an artist. His principal Italian works are the stanzas called La Giostra, written upon Giuliano de' Medici's victory in a tournament; the Orfeo, a lyrical drama performed at Mantua with musical accompaniment; and a collection of fugitive pieces, reproducing various forms of Tuscan popular poetry. La Giostra had no plan, and remained imperfect; but it demonstrated the capacities of the octave stanza for rich, harmonious and sonorous metrical effect. The Orfeo is a slight piece of work, thrown off at a heat, yet abounding in unpremeditated lyrical beauties, and containing in itself the germ both of the pastoral play and of the opera. The Tuscan songs are distinguished by a roseate fluency," an exquisite charm of half romantic, half humorous abandonment to fancy, which mark them out as improvisations of genius. It may be added that in all these departments of Italian composition Poliziano showed how the taste and learning of a classical scholar could be engrafted on the stock of the vernacular, and how the highest perfection of artistic form might be attained in Italian without a sacrifice of native spontaneity and natural flow of language. It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At The unequivocal stand of Polk and his party in favour of the immediate annexation of Texas and the adoption of a vigorous policy in Oregon contrasted favourably with the timid vacillations of Henry Clay and the Whigs. Polk was elected, receiving 170 electoral votes to 105 for his opponent Clay. In forming his cabinet he secured the services of James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, as secretary of state, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, as secretary of the treasury, William L. Marcy of New York, as secretary of war, and George Bancroft, then of Massachusetts, as secretary of the navy. There is no doubt that each of these men, and Bancroft in particular, influenced the policy of the administration, yet the historian James Schouler, who has made a careful study of the Polk papers, is doubtless correct in saying that the president himself was "the framer of the public policy which he carried into so successful execution, and that instead of being led (as many might have imagined) by the more famous statesmen of his administration and party who surrounded him, he in reality led and shaped his own executive course." Bancroft's opinion is that Polk was "prudent, far-sighted, bold, exceeding any Democrat of his day in his undeviatingly correct exposition of Democratic principles." a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian charac- | in the South, in order to defeat Lewis Cass and James Buchanan. ter and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with George Bancroft, the historian, has asserted that this suggestion facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of came originally from him, and Gideon J. Pillow, Polk's intimate scholarship which were then most seriously prized-in varied friend, did much to bring about the nomination. knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. At the same time, almost against his own inclination, certainly with very little enthusiasm on his part, he lent himself so successfully to Lorenzo de' Medici's scheme for resuscitating the decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future. He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity-as the man who most perfectly expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favour of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. He was present, indeed, at the attack made by the Pazzi conspirators on the persons of Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, and wrote an interesting account of its partial success. He also contributed a curious document on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici to the students of Florentine history. But he was not, like many other humanists of his age, concerned in public affairs of state or diplomacy, and he held no office except that of professor at Florence. His private life was also uneventful. He passed it as a house-friend and dependant of the Medici, as the idol of the learned world, and as a simple man of letters for whom (with truly Tuscan devotion to the Saturnian country) rural pleasures were always acceptable. He was never married; and his morals incurred suspicion, to which his own Greek verses lend a certain amount of plausible colouring. In character Poliziano was decidedly inferior to the intellectual and literary eminence which he displayed. He died, half broken-hearted by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de' Medici, on the 24th of September 1494, just before the wave of foreign invasion which was gathering in France swept over Italy. For the life and works of Politian, see F. O. Mencken (Leipzig, 1736), a vast repertory of accumulated erudition; Jac. Mähly, Angelus Politianus (Leipzig, 1864); Carducci's edition of the Italian poems (Florence, Barbera, 1863); Del Lungo's edition of the Italian prose works and Latin and Greek poems (Florence, Barbera, 1867); the Opera omnia (Basel, 1554); Greswell's English Life of Politian (1805); Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici (10th ed., 1851); J. Addington Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, and translations from Poliziano's Italian poems in Symonds's Sketches and Studies in Italy, which include the Orfeo. (J. A. S.) The four chief events of President Polk's administration were the final establishment of the independent treasury system, the reduction of the tariff by the Walker Bill of 1846, the adjustment of the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain by the treaty concluded on the 15th of June 1846, and the war with Mexico and the consequent acquisition of territory in the south-west and west. The first three of these were recommended in his first annual message, and he privately announced to Bancroft his determination to seize California. The independent treasury plan originated during Van Buren's administration as a Democratic measure; it had been repealed by the Whigs in 1841, and was now re-enacted. Protectionists contend that the tariff legislation of 1846 was in direct violation of a pledge given to the Democrats of Pennsylvania in a letter written by Polk during the campaign to John K. Kane of Philadelphia. Briefly summarized, this letter approves of a tariff for revenue with incidental protection, whereas the annual message of the 2nd of December 1845 criticizes the whole theory of protection and urges the adoption of a revenue tariff just sufficient to meet the needs of the government conducted on an economical basis. It is difficult to determine whether this was always his idea of incidental protection, or whether his views were changed after 1844 through the influence of Walker and the example set by Sir Robert Peel in Great Britain, or whether he was simply "playing politics to secure the protectionist vote in Pennsylvania. POLK, JAMES KNOX (1795-1849), eleventh president of the United States, was born in Mecklenburg county, North Carolina, on the 2nd of November 1795. In 1806 he crossed the mountains with his parents and settled in what is now Maury county, The one overshadowing issue of the time, however, was Tennessee. He graduated from the university of North Carolina territorial expansion. Polk was an ardent expansionist, but in 1818, studied law in the office of Felix Grundy (1777-1840) at the old idea that his policy was determined entirely by a desire Nashville in 1819-1820, was admitted to the bar in 1820, and to advance the interests of slavery is no longer accepted. As a began to practise in Columbia, the county-seat of Maury county. matter of fact, he was personally in favour of insisting upon After two years of service (1823-1825) in the state House of 54° 40′ as the boundary in Oregon, and threw upon Congress the Representatives, he represented the sixth Tennessee district responsibility for accepting 49° as the boundary, and he approved in the National House of Representatives from 1825 to 1839. the acquisition of California, Utah and New Mexico, territory In the party conflicts which succeeded the presidential election from which slavery was excluded by geographical and climatic of 1824 he sided with the Jackson-Van Buren faction, and soon conditions. Furthermore a study of his manuscript diary now became recognized as leader of the Democratic forces. He was shows that he opposed the efforts of Walker and Buchanan in speaker from 1835 until 1839, when he retired from Congress the Cabinet, and of Daniel S. Dickinson (1800-1866) of New to become governor of Tennessee. His administration (1839-1841) York and Edward A. Hannegan (d. 1859) of Indiana, in the was successful, but he was unable to overcome the popular Whig Senate, to retain the whole of Mexico, territory in which slavery movement of that period, and was defeated in 1841 and again in might have thrived. At the close of his term (March 4, 1849) 1843. When the Democratic national convention met in Balti-Polk retired to his home in Nashville, Tennessee, where he died more in 1844 he was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Vice-presidency, but was suddenly brought forward as a "dark horse" and selected to head the ticket. Finding it impossible under the two-thirds rule to nominate their candidate, the followers of Van Buren brought forward Polk, who was popular | on the 15th of the following June. minister to England. He was succeeded as secretary of the navy 1 Bancroft served until September 1846, when he was appointed by John J. Mason, who had previously held the office of attorney. general. See John S. Jenkins, James Knox Polk (Auburn and Buffalo, 1850), and L. B. Chase, History of the Polk Administration (New York, 1850), both of which contain some documentary material, but are not discriminating in their method of treatment. George Bancroft contributed a good short sketch to J. G. Wilson's Presidents of the United States (New York, 2nd ed., 1894). He made copies of the Polk manuscripts and was working upon a detailed biography at the time of his death in 1891. These copies, now deposited in the Lenox Library, New York City, contain a diary in 24 typewritten volumes, besides some correspondence and other private papers. They have been used by James Schouler in his Historical Briefs (New York, 1896), and by E. G. Bourne in an article entitled "The Proposed Absorption of Mexico in 18471848," published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1899, i. 157-169 (Washington, 1900). Bourne discusses the part which Polk took in preventing the complete absorption of Mexico. See also the Diary of James K. Polk.... 1845 to 1849 (Chicago, 4 vols., 1910), edited by M. M. Quaife. (W. R. S.*) POLK, LEONIDAS (1806-1864), American soldier, was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, on the 10th of April 1806, and was a cousin of James Knox Polk, president of the United States. He was educated at West Point, but afterwards studied theology and took orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1831. In 1838 he became missionary bishop of the South-West, Arkansas, Indian Territory, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, and in 1841 he was consecrated bishop of Louisiana. His work in the Church was largely of an educational kind, and he played a prominent part in movements for the establishment of higher educational institutions in the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he resigned his bishopric and, like many other clergymen and ministers of religion, entered the army which was raised to defend the Confederacy. His rank in the hierarchy and the universal respect in which he was held in the South, rather than his early military education, caused him to be appointed to the important rank of major-general. He fortified the post of Columbus, Kentucky, the foremost line of defence on the Mississippi, against which Brigadier-General U. S. Grant directed the offensive reconnaissance of Belmont in the autumn. In the following spring, the first line of defence having fallen, Polk commanded a corps at Shiloh in the field army commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard. In October 1862 he was promoted lieutenant-general, and thenceforward he commanded one of the three corps of the army of Tennessee under Bragg and afterwards was in charge of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana. He was killed in the fighting in front of Marietta, while reconnoitring near Pine Mountain, Georgia, on the 14th of June 1864. See Life, by his son W. M. Polk, (1893). POLKA (either from the Czech pulka, half, with an allusion to the short steps characteristic of the dance, or from the Polish Polka, feminine of Polak, a Pole), a lively dance of Bohemian origin, danced to music written in time. (See DANCE.) PRINTED IN U.S.A. |