The state system regularly provides against such mistakes of official judgment by carefully divorcing the _duty_ to enforce from the _incentive_ to enforce. The New York laws forbid the placing of wagers on horse races. They stand there presumably as a monument to the enlightened conscience of a majority of the people. They were not enacted as an expression of moral sentimentality to be ignored at will, but as an instruction for the governor, the administrative establishment of the state and the courts to carry out. The statute is of course obeyed in all counties where there are no race tracks and no facilities for placing bets! But in the other counties? The legislature has provided no means of execution other than the locally controlled peace officers, the sheriffs and the constables. These are the servants of the state, to be sure, and they are sworn to protect its laws. But in a more direct human way they are of the county, bound to the local hotel keepers, the local retail merchants and the jitney bus owners whose business thrives on the patronage of the race-track crowd. Local public opinion in the race-track district flouts the will of the people of the state and it says to the state, as President Jackson said to the Supreme Court, “You have made your decision; now enforce it.” Only occasionally does moral sentiment run strong enough to force the governor to be in fact as well as in theory the real head of the state in the sense that he employs state instruments to enforce state desires. Such an incident occurred a few years ago when the governor of Indiana was compelled to order out the militia to enforce a law against race-track gambling because he had no power to compel the elective sheriff or other local officers to do their duty. In practical politics this clash of moral standards produces not only the anomalous situation referred to but often the strictly administrative matter of law enforcement is consciously and designedly a political issue. The popular desire to graduate or temper the enforcement of the law is doubtless the real secret of interest which so often centers in the election of a district attorney. Shall we have a “liberal” administration or shall we “clap on the lid,” that is about the form the question takes--euphony for: “Shall the prosecutor shut his eyes and ignore the law, or shall he obey it according to his official oath?” The liberal candidate goes before the people with promises to go easy and the strict morality candidate to make the way of the transgressor hard. Which is right? For the present it matters little. It remains simply to point out that since the organization of the state and county provides no organ of expression for local policy, the people in their infinite capacity to adapt themselves to a hard condition proceed to make a policy-determining body out of a strictly administrative officer, like the district attorney or the sheriff.