would appear to be hopeless. The history of Prohibition in Maine will for ever form an eloquent proof of the mischief which comes when the ancient ecclesiastical failure to distinguish between the sphere of morals and the sphere of law is perpetuated under the conditions of modern life. The attempt to force men to render unto Cæsar the things which are God's must always end thus.
In these matters we witness in America the survival of an ancient tradition. The early Puritans were individualists, it is true, but their individualism took a theocratic form, and, in the name of God, they looked upon crimes and vices equally and indistinguishably as sins. We see exactly the same point of view in the Penitentials of the ninth century, which were ecclesiastical codes dealing, exactly in the same spirit and in the same way, with crime and with vice, recognizing nothing but a certain difference in degree between murder and masturbation. In the ninth century, and even much later, in Calvin's Geneva and Cotton Mather's New England, it was possible to carry into practice this theocratic conception of the unity of vices and crimes and the punishment as sins of both alike, for the community generally accepted that point of view. But that is very far from being the case in the United States of to-day. The result is that in America in this respect we find a condition of things analogous to that which existed in France, before the Revolution remoulded the laws in accordance with the temperament of the nation. Laws and regulations of the medieval kind, for the moral ordering of the smallest details of life, are still enacted in America, but they are regarded with growing contempt by the community and even by the administrators of the laws. It is realized that such minute inquisition into the citizen's private life can only be effectively carried out where the citizen himself recognizes the divine right of the inquisitor. But the theocratic conception of life no longer corresponds to American ideas or American customs; this minute moral legislation rests on a basis which in the course of centuries has become rotten. Thus it has come about that