Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/270

 *sibility, and is more and more disposed to look to the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of conduct.

XLIV

It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform administration, or an administration elected as a protest against the evils of machine government, boss rule, and the domination of public service corporations, is immediately confronted by the demand of those who call themselves the good people to enforce all the sumptuary laws and to exterminate vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies and representatives seek to divert the attention of the administration from themselves and their larger and more complex immoralities to the small and uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the hope of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued, just as friends of the fox might turn aside the hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the trail. Many a progressive administration in this land has been led into that cul de sac, and as Mr. Carl Hovey observed recently of the neat saying to the effect that the way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it, the process usually proves to be merely the way to get rid of a good administration. The effort had been made by the opponents of Golden Rule Jones and it had failed. It had been attempted in the case of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously enough the effort was never made in Toledo or in