That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology. The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression; no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long, or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train, or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.” And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls, inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session. And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every winter--and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities, undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been scientifically exhausted. The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity, without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature, and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and absolutely bad people.