It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with each other. If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,--that is, no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that the laws should be enforced against _him_. Everybody hates a policeman just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the police department are composed of the same kind of men, paid the same salaries, and responsible to the same authorities. The duty of the fireman is, of course, the simpler, because there is no disagreement among men about the thing to be done. When a fire breaks out in the city, the fire department is expected to rush to the spot, to pour water on the fire, and to continue pouring water on the fire until it ceases to burn. The reforming mind seems to think that the duty of the policeman is of equal simplicity, and that when a wrong is done, the sole duty of the police consists in rushing immediately to that spot, seizing the wrongdoer, and, by confining him in a prison, thereby eradicate his tendency to do wrong, and, by holding him up as an example to others who are considering the commission of that wrong, to deter them from it. As far as crimes are concerned, the policemen, indeed, do fairly well. Though that they succeed in any measure at all in discharging their functions is a wonder when one considers the contumely and abuse that are constantly heaped upon them in all our cities. The newspapers, when there are no accounts of crime to print--and the assumption is that crimes and casualties, if they are horrid enough, are the principal events in the annals of mankind worth chronicling--can always print suggestions of the crimes of the police. The reporter, a human being himself, dissatisfied because the policemen cannot gratify his hunger for sensation, is not to blame, perhaps; he views life from the standpoint of his own necessities, and his conception of life is of a series of exciting tragedies enacted with a view to making the first edition interesting, so that the ears of the populace may be assaulted in the gloom of each evening’s dusk by that hideous bellowing of the news “boy,” whose heavy voice booms through the shade like some mighty portent of disaster in the world.