The police power, then, is properly concerned only with crimes and trespasses. It cannot rightfully invade the realm of ethics, as such. Crime is theoretically a direct injury to the public, and trespass, a direct injury to the individual. A vice, on the contrary, is the inordinate gratification of one’s desires and passions. The primary damage is to one’s self. In contemplating the nature of a vice, we are not conscious of a trespass on the rights of others. Vice does not fall within the police power. Expressed in the language of Mr. Tiedeman, “the object of police power, is the prevention of crime--the protection of rights against the assaults of others. The police power of the government cannot properly be brought into operation for the purpose of exacting obedience to the rules of morality, and banishing vice and sin from the world. The moral laws can exact obedience only in _foro conscientiæ_. The municipal law has only to do with trespasses. It cannot be called into play in order to save one from the evil consequences of his own vices, for the violation of a right, by the action of another, must exist or be threatened, in order to justify the interference of law.” The people of this country are generally convinced of this truth. So widespread is the conviction that, where a law “does not have for its object the prevention or punishment of a trespass upon rights, it is impossible to obtain for it an enthusiastic and unanimous support.” Besides, it is true of every community, when “public opinion is aroused to an activity that will enforce a law for the prevention of vice, the moral force alone will be ample to suppress it.” But it is sometimes urged that an otherwise ineffectual statute may serve to direct public opinion in the right direction. To this I reply that one unerring truth is taught by the history of legislation: “It is the utter futility, in a corrective sense, of a law whose enactment is not the unavoidable resultant of the forces then in play in organized society. Nothing so weakens the reverence for law, and diminishes its effectiveness, as still-born statutes.”