Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/263

 does not seem to excite resistance or even remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the principle to care anything about it.

There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless, shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:

"And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!"

"Ah, yes," said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; "but they were not enforced!"

It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been enforced the little girl's condition would have been even worse than it was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with each other.

If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,—that is, no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that the laws should be enforced against him. Everybody hates a policeman just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the police department are composed of the same kind of men,