repeal of Prohibition by enormous majorities. The people of Maine are evidently becoming dimly conscious that it is worse than useless to make laws which no human power can enforce. "The result of the vote," writes Mr. Arthur Sherwell, an English social Reformer, not himself opposed to temperance legislation, "from every point of view, and not least from the point of view of temperance, is eminently unsatisfactory, and it unquestionably creates a position of great difficulty and embarrassment for the authorities. A majority of 700 in a total poll of 120,000 is clearly not a sufficient mandate for a drastic law which previous experience has conclusively shown cannot be enforced successfully in the urban districts of the State." Successful enforcement of prohibition on a State basis 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