Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/304

 Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to control the hetaerae and dicteriades and the severe regulations of ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the police.

The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails because of its immorality!

The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if—as is now recommended—they be called "morals" police. The word has a reassuring note of course, possibly by some confused with "moral" police, but policemen are policemen still. I have seen the police des moeurs in European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with them. That is, all cities have