In England, on the other hand, there is no regulation; any evening along Piccadilly, one may see street walkers whom the police never dream of molesting. It is in part due to the traditional Puritanic attitude of our northern race, and partly to the respect for personal liberty that exists in England. There the principle is much more scrupulously respected than with us, with whom individual liberty indeed, is hardly a principle at all. With us the phrase “personal liberty” is regarded merely as a shibboleth of brewers and distillers, an evidence on the part of him who employs it that he is a besotted slave to drink and an unscrupulous minion of the rum power. The interferences practiced daily by our policemen are unknown there, and if, for instance, it should even be proposed that an enactment like that in Oklahoma limiting the amount of liquor a man may keep in his own house, and providing that agents of the state may enter his domicile at will and make a search, and especially if in the remotest region of the British Isles there should be an instance of what Walt Whitman calls “the never ending audacity of elected persons,” such as is of daily occurrence in that state where these agents enter railway trains and slit open the valises of travelers in their quest of the stuff, the whole of the question hour the next afternoon in the House of Commons would be occupied with indignant interpellations of the home secretary and the _Times_ could not contain all the letters that would be written. Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to control the _hetaerae_ and _dicteriades_ and the severe regulations of ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the police. The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails because of its immorality!