For the police can never become the agents of any morality of the heart, and all the repression in the world can only touch the surface of life. The English attitude, again, is characteristically seen in the method of dealing with homosexual practices and other similar sexual aberrations. Here, legally, England is closer to Germany than to modern France. No country in the world, it is often said, has preserved by tradition and even maintained by recent accretion such severe penalties against homosexual offences as England. Yet, unlike the Germans, the English do not actively prosecute in these cases and are usually content to leave the law in abeyance, so long as public order and decency are reasonably maintained. English people, like the French people, are by no means impressed by the advantages of the German system by which purely private scandals are made public scandals, to be set forth day after day in all their details before the court, and discussed excitedly by the whole population. Yet the English law in this matter is still very widely upheld. There are very many English people who think that the fact that homosexuality is disgusting to most people is a reason for punishing it with extreme severity. Yet disgust is a matter of taste, we cannot properly impart it into our laws; a disgusting person is not necessarily a criminal person, or we shall have to enact that many inmates of our hospitals and lunatic asylums be hanged. There is thus a fundamental inconsistency in the English method of dealing with immorality; it is made up of opposite views, some of them extreme in contrary directions. But by virtue of the national tendency to compromise, these conflicting tendencies work in a fairly harmonious manner. The result is that the general state of English morality--notwithstanding, and perhaps partly by reason of, its prudish anxiety to leave unpleasant matters alone--is at least as satisfactory as that of countries where much more logical and thorough methods are in favour.