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 nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of the police; nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.
When we thus bear in mind the historical aspect of the matter we can understand how it has come about that the individualistic idealist in America has been much more resolute than in England to effect reforms, much more determined that they shall be very thorough and extreme reforms, and, especially, much more eager to embody his moral aspirations in legal statutes. But his tasks are bigger than in England, because of the vast, unstable, heterogeneous and crude population he has to deal with, and because, at the same time, he has no firmly established centralized and reliable police instrument whereby to effect his reforms. The fiery American moral idealist is determined to set out for the Kingdom of Heaven at once, but every steed he mounts proves broken-winded, and speedily drops down by the wayside.