long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on pretty steadily from that time to this.
XLI
I suppose the discussion is one which must go on
always in any land where the people of our race
and tradition dwell. A more objective, natural and
naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and
when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of
the difficulty of administering the affairs of a modern
city according to "the standard of exquisite morals"
held aloft by some persons for others, he designated
in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar
to every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order
of indurated mind with which they are endowed.
They begin with the naïve assumption that their
standard is the one and only correct standard, and
that since men have repeatedly refused to adopt it
on mere inspection they must be forced to do so by
the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining
"law and order." They believe that any
wrong, any abuse, may be stopped instantly by the
passage of a law, and if one venture to question the
