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, as has been pointed out, is not so much in the policemen as in that _bêtisse humaine_ which expects such superhuman work of them. This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police. Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the term _crime_ is made to include all the follies and weaknesses and vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and beyond human ability.