Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/256

 business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long, or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train, or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the state legislature, and repeats the formula: "There ought to be a law." And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-*polls, inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session. And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every winter—and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities, undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under the crystal dome