- sibility, and is more and more disposed to look to
the law and its administrators as the regulators and mentors of conduct.
XLIV
It is an axiom of municipal politics that a reform
administration, or an administration elected as a
protest against the evils of machine government,
boss rule, and the domination of public service corporations,
is immediately confronted by the demand
of those who call themselves the good people to
enforce all the sumptuary laws and to exterminate
vice. That is, the privileged interests and their allies
and representatives seek to divert the attention of
the administration from themselves and their larger
and more complex immoralities to the small and
uninfluential offenders, an old device, always, in the
hope of escape, inspired by privilege when pursued,
just as friends of the fox might turn aside the
hounds by drawing the aniseed bag across the trail.
Many a progressive administration in this land has
been led into that cul de sac, and as Mr. Carl Hovey
observed recently of the neat saying to the effect
that the way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce
it, the process usually proves to be merely the way
to get rid of a good administration. The effort had
been made by the opponents of Golden Rule Jones
and it had failed. It had been attempted in the case
of Tom Johnson and it had failed, though curiously
enough the effort was never made in Toledo or in
