and post cards, and of the nude in art, and of lingerie in show windows, and of boys swimming in the river, and playing in the streets, and scores of other conditions which seemed to inspire in them the fear or the thought of evil.
With the advent of spring, the mayor must put a stop to lovers wandering in the parks; when summer comes he must put an end instantly to baseball; in the winter he must close the theaters and the dance halls; in short, as I said before, whenever it was reported from any quarter that there were people having fun, the police must instantly be despatched to put a stop to it.
And strangely enough, even when we did succeed in doing away with some of the evils of the town, when we closed the saloons promptly at midnight, the hour fixed by ordinance, when we did away with many evil resorts, when wine rooms were extirpated, and the number of maisons de tolerance were reduced by eighty-five per cent, when gambling was stamped out, their complaints did not subside, but went on, unabated, the same as before. They could not be satisfied because the whole of their impossible program was not adopted, and more because there was no public recognition of their infallibility and no admission of their righteousness. What that type of mind desires is not, after all, any reasonable treatment of those conditions, or any honest and sincere endeavor to deal with them. It demands intellectual surrender, the acknowledgment of its infallibility, and a protesting hypocrite can more easily meet its views than anyone else.
