fervour of the moral impulse has strengthened the individualistic element.11 We see this clearly in the fact that England has even gone beyond France in rejecting the control of prostitutes. The French are striving to abolish such control, but in England where it was never extensively established it has long been abolished, leaving only a few faint traces behind. It is abhorrent to the English mind that even the most degraded specimens of humanity should be compulsorily deprived of rights over their own persons, even when it is claimed that the deprivation of such rights might be for the benefit of the community. In no country, perhaps, is the prostitute so free to parade the streets in the exercise of her profession as in England, and in no country is public opinion so intolerant of even the suspicion of a mistake by the police in the exercise of that very limited control over prostitutes which they possess. The freedom of the prostitute in England is further guaranteed by the very fervour of English religious feeling; for active interference with prostitutes involves regulation of prostitution, and that implies a national recognition of prostitution which to a very large section of the English people would be altogether repellant. Thus English love of freedom and English love of God combine to protect the prostitute. It has to be added that this result is by no means, as some have imagined, hostile to morality. It is the opinion of many foreign observers that in this matter London, for all its freedom, compares favourably with many other large cities where prostitution is severely regulated by the police and so far as possible concealed. For the police can never become the agents of any morality of the heart, and all the repression in the world can only touch the surface of life.
The English attitude, again, is characteristically seen in the method of dealing with homosexual practices and other similar sexual aberrations. Here, legally, England is closer to Germany than to modern France. No country in the world, it is often said, has preserved by tradition and even maintained by recent accretion such severe penalties against homosexual