anxiety to secure legal opportunities for his own enjoyment of vice.
This consideration especially applies to professional politicians. A
Member of Parliament, who must cultivate an immaculately pure
reputation, feels that he is also bound to record by his vote how
anxious he is to suppress other people's immorality. Thus the philistine
and the hypocrite join hands with the simple-minded idealist. Very few
are left to point out that, however desirable it is to prevent
immorality, that end can never be attained by law.

During the past ten years one of these waves of enthusiasm for the
moralization of the public by law has been sweeping across Europe and
America. Its energy is scarcely yet exhausted, and it may therefore be
worthwhile to call attention to it. The movement has shown special
activity in Germany, in Holland, in England, in the United States, and
is traceable in a minor degree in many other countries. In Germany the
Lex Heintze in 1900 was an indication of the appearance of this
movement, while various scandals have had the result of attracting an
exaggerated amount of attention to questions of immorality and of
tightening the rigour of the law, though as Germany already holds moral
matters in a very complex web of regulations it can scarcely be said
that the new movement has here found any large field of activity. In
Holland it is different. Holland is one of the traditional lands of
freedom; it was the home of independent intellect, of free religion, of
autonomous morals, when every other country in Europe was closed to
these manifestations of the spirit, and something of the same tradition
has always inspired its habits of thought, even when they have been
largely Puritanic. So that there was here a clear field for the movement
to work in, and it has found expression, of a very thorough character
indeed, in the new so-called "Morals Law" which was passed in 1911 after
several weeks' discussion. Undoubtedly this law contains excellent
features; thus the agents of the "white slave trade," who have hitherto
been especially active in Holland, are now threatened with five years'
imprisonment. Here we are concerned with what may fairly be regarded as
crime and rightly punishable as such. But excellent provisions like
these are lost to sight in a great number of other paragraphs which are
at best useless and ridiculous, and at worst vexatious and mischievous
in their attempts to limit the free play of civilizati