offences as England. Yet, unlike the Germans, the English do not actively prosecute in these cases and are usually content to leave the law in abeyance, so long as public order and decency are reasonably maintained. English people, like the French people, are by no means impressed by the advantages of the German system by which purely private scandals are made public scandals, to be set forth day after day in all their details before the court, and discussed excitedly by the whole population. Yet the English law in this matter is still very widely upheld. There are very many English people who think that the fact that homosexuality is disgusting to most people is a reason for punishing it with extreme severity. Yet disgust is a matter of taste, we cannot properly impart it into our laws; a disgusting person is not necessarily a criminal person, or we shall have to enact that many inmates of our hospitals and lunatic asylums be hanged. There is thus a fundamental inconsistency in the English method of dealing with immorality; it is made up of opposite views, some of them extreme in contrary directions. But by virtue of the national tendency to compromise, these conflicting tendencies work in a fairly harmonious manner. The result is that the general state of English morality—notwithstanding, and perhaps partly by reason of, its prudish anxiety to leave unpleasant matters alone—is at least as satisfactory as that of countries where much more logical and thorough methods are in favour.
In the United States we see yet another attitude towards immorality. It is, indeed, related to the English attitude, necessarily so, since the most ancient and fundamental element of it was carried over to America by the English Puritans, who cherished in the extreme form alike the English passion for individualism and the English fervour of religious idealism. These germs have been too potent for destruction even under all the new influences of American life. But they are not altogether in harmony with those influences, and the result has been that the American attitude towards immorality has sometimes looked rather like