Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought, namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now, and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the page with the learned annotations.

XLII

Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that “nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The difficulty is due of course to the fact that the old medieval confusion of crime and vice persists in a community where the Puritan tradition still strongly survives. The incapability, as has been pointed out, is not so much in the policemen as in that bêtisse humaine which expects such superhuman work of them.

This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police. Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the term crime is made to include all the follies and weaknesses and vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and beyond human ability.

The police know it, and everybody knows it, and it is the hypocrisy of society that corrupts them. The police know, intuitively, and without any process of ratiocination, that people are human, and subject to human frailties; they are pretty human themselves, and, in common with most of the people in the community, see no great wrong in some of the things that are done which the sumptuary laws condemn. Most of them, for instance, drink a glass of beer now and then, or play a game of cards, or go to a baseball game on Sunday. They are not apt to be gentlemen of the most refined and exquisite tastes. And it is difficult to induce men to take much interest in punishing acts their own consciences do not condemn. This, with the situation at its best; at its worst, knowing that, despite all the enactments of legislatures, people will continue in their hardened ways, they are apt to abuse their power. For they know, too, that the statutes prohibiting the merely venial of those acts oftentimes run counter to the urban custom and that the community regards it as of no great consequence if they are not enforced. Thus a wide discretion is permitted the police by the public conscience in the discharge of their duties, and this discretion is one which quite humanly they proceed to abuse. If they choose, they may enforce the sumptuary laws against certain persons or refrain from doing so, and the opportunity for corruption is presented. The opportunity widens, opens into a larger field, and not only does the corruption spread, but it is not long before the police are employing extra legal methods in other directions, and at last in many instances establish an actual tyranny that would not be tolerated in a monarchy. The result is that we read every day of arbitrary interferences by policemen with most of the constitutional rights, such as free speech, the right of assembly and petition, etc. They even set up a censorship and condemn paintings, or prohibit the performance of plays, or assume to banish women from the streets because they are dressed in a style which the police do not consider comme il faut.

And while the corruption is deplored and everywhere causes indignation and despair, this tyranny does not seem to excite resistance or even remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the principle to care anything about it.

There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless, shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:

“And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!”

“Ah, yes,” said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; “but they were not enforced!”

It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with each other.