Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/320

 of the sovereign power, and in our proverbial fear and jealousy of kings we see that he does not have too much power or develop those powers he has by a long tenure of office.

The officials of a German city are pure administrators, and nothing else; they are not governors or censors. They are not charged in fact with police powers at all. And if they were, they would not have questions of such delicacy to meet, for the police there are for the purpose of protecting life and property, and they are not expected to regulate the personal conduct and refine the morals of the community, or to rear the young. They have not confused their functions with the censores mores of old Rome, or like us, with the beadles of New England villages of colonial times. That is, the Puritan spirit is not known there, at least in the intensified acerbity in which it exists with us; moral problems, oddly enough, are left to parents, teachers or pastors. The police over there are generally a part of the military organizations. It would be better of course, to bear the ills we have than to transplant any military system to our soil, for state police in America would become mere Cossacks employed to keep the laboring population in subjection. But if the state is to undertake to regulate the moral conduct of the inhabitants of cities, it should provide all the means of regulation and take all the responsibility, including the onus of violating the democratic principle. If the state is to regenerate the land by the machinery of morals police, it should have its own morals police, tell them just how to proceed to