ty Streets." She calls
attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for
pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and
failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge.
The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all
sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow
quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures."

For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else
supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that
most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the
corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst.
Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to
exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl
in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the
life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all
lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic
novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to
abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous,
explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The
Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England.
They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches
instead.

We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic
sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business
administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the
"ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of
well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even
rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart
the admonitions of the Evening Post.

We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We
forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue
of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing
nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average
municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man li