ent
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 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
e