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,
