The unsightliness of the billboards is not their only objectionable feature. Unless they are firmly anchored in the ground they are often blown down by heavy winds; they afford places of concealment for footpads; and they become the nucleus of a rubbish heap. Land is rented for billboard space which otherwise would be improved and built upon. Billboard space is given over very largely to the advertising of non-essentials. If you will make a survey of say fifty billboards in your own community, you will find that by far the greater portion of the space is given to advertising luxuries. Local merchants use billboard advertising very little. Outside concerns take most of their surface. Footnote 87: Restrictions may legally be placed upon private property in the interest of the public safety, health, or morals. But people cannot be prohibited from using their own private property in ways which merely offend the public taste. Footnote 88: The watchmen were very unreliable. In London it was said that most of them spent the greater part of the night in the ale-houses while thieves prowled around in the streets. In order to keep the watchmen on their patrols it became the custom to have them call out the hours as they went along. These watchmen’s cries, “Three o’clock, a misty morning”, etc., were a quaint feature of London life a hundred years ago. Footnote 89: Sir Robert Peel, who established the first regular police force in England, made himself very unpopular for a time by this step. The members of the new police force, by way of ridicule, were called “peelers” and “bobbies”, and these nicknames persist in England to the present day. They wore (and still wear) blue coats with copper buttons, for which reason the London youngsters also referred to the policeman as “the copper”. In America we have shortened it to “the cop”. Footnote 90: In Berlin, for example, 98 per cent of the buildings are of brick, stone, concrete, or other fire-resisting material. In the average American city such buildings do not usually form more than 25 per cent of the total. Footnote 91: Take the income-tax amendment, for example; or the prohibition amendment. Both of them show a popular willingness to place great powers in the hands of the federal government. The people would not have agreed to direct election of senators a hundred years ago; but they did it in 1913. Footnote 92: Hawaii and Alaska are both governed in the same way, and exactly like one of the old territories. Porto Rico has a slightly different form of government, in that certain high officials besides the governor are appointed by the President. The government of the Philippines differs still further in that the higher administrative officials are appointed by the governor who, in turn, is named by the President. Footnote 93: