Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/163

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INCESSANT POLICE COMPULSION.
149

pleasure he is threatened with punishment. His wife presents him with a child. More bother. He must register the fact at the proper place, or else it will go hard with the little one later. He must also attend to its being vaccinated, although he has noticed that persons not vaccinated resisted the disease, during a small-pox epidemic, while others who had been vaccinated, took it and died.

I hasten by the hundred petty annoyances which Hans meets with during the year. He wanted to establish an omnibus line to run in the streets of his native city; he was not allowed to do so without a license. He took a fancy to a charming spot in the public park, kept up by the money of the city treasury; he was warned to keep off the grass. He undertook one day a pedestrian tour through his province; a few hours after he had started, he met a policeman who began asking him all kinds of indiscrete questions, about his name, his business, his family, trip, etc., and when he replied somewhat cavalierly to this total stranger who had not introduced himself, with the customary apology, he was forced to undergo several annoying indignities before he was at liberty to continue his tour. A neighbor one day coolly appropriated part of his garden and fenced it in for his own use; Hans appealed to the law; the proof of the trespass was clear and convincing; the case dragged along for months. He won the suit, but the defendant proved that he was insolvent, so that although Hans got the bit of his garden back again, he had lost in time and money about twenty times what it was worth, to say nothing of the vexation, which he did not reckon in the account—because he was so used to it from his youth up. He saw in the Museum a beautiful picture of the time of the Renaissance, the clothing of the persons represented in it appeared to him so sensible and