XLII
Speaking of this passion for laws and regulations and how some of the zealous would order even the most private and personal details of life in these states, Mr. Havelock Ellis, in a brilliant chapter of his work, “The Task of Social Hygiene,” takes occasion to observe that “nowhere in the world is there so great an anxiety to place the moral regulation of social affairs in the hands of police,” and that “nowhere are the police more incapable of carrying out such regulation.” The difficulty is due of course to the fact that the old medieval confusion of crime and vice persists in a community where the Puritan tradition still strongly survives. The incapability,as has been pointed out, is not so much in the policemen as in thatbêtisse humainewhich expects such superhuman work of them.
This insistent confusion of vice with crime has not only had the effect of fostering both, but is the cause of the corruption of the police. Their proper function is to protect life and property and maintain the public peace, and this the police of American cities perform as well as policemen anywhere. But when, by a trick of the sectarian mind, the termcrimeis made to include all the follies and weaknesses and vices of humanity, where there is added the duty of enforcing statutes against a multitude of acts, some of which only Puritanical severity classes as crimes, others of which are regarded by the human beings in the community with indifference, tolerance or sympathy, while still others are inherent in mysterious and imperative instincts which balk all efforts at general control, the task becomes wholly impossible and beyond human ability.
The police know it, and everybody knows it, and it is the hypocrisy of society that corrupts them. The police know, intuitively, and without any process of ratiocination, that people are human, and subject to human frailties; they are pretty human themselves, and, in common with most of the people in the community, see no great wrong in some of the things that are done which the sumptuary laws condemn. Most of them, for instance, drink a glass of beer now and then, or play a game of cards, or go to a baseball game on Sunday. They are not apt to be gentlemen of the most refined and exquisite tastes.And it is difficult to induce men to take much interest in punishing acts their own consciences do not condemn. This, with the situation at its best; at its worst, knowing that, despite all the enactments of legislatures, people will continue in their hardened ways, they are apt to abuse their power. For they know, too, that the statutes prohibiting the merely venial of those acts oftentimes run counter to the urban custom and that the community regards it as of no great consequence if they are not enforced. Thus a wide discretion is permitted the police by the public conscience in the discharge of their duties, and this discretion is one which quite humanly they proceed to abuse. If they choose, they may enforce the sumptuary laws against certain persons or refrain from doing so, and the opportunity for corruption is presented. The opportunity widens, opens into a larger field, and not only does the corruption spread, but it is not long before the police are employing extra legal methods in other directions, and at last in many instances establish an actual tyranny that would not be tolerated in a monarchy. The result is that we read every day of arbitrary interferences by policemen with most of the constitutional rights, such as free speech, the right of assembly and petition, etc. They even set up a censorship and condemn paintings, or prohibit the performance of plays, or assume to banish women from the streets because they are dressed in a style which the police do not considercomme il faut.
And while the corruption is deplored and everywhere causes indignation and despair, this tyrannydoes not seem to excite resistance or even remark; the press, the paladium of our liberties, does not often protest against it, and few seem to have sufficient grasp of the principle to care anything about it.
There is a story somewhere of a little girl, homeless, supperless, shivering in rags in the cold rain of the streets of New York, and of a passer-by observing in a kind of sardonic sympathy:
“And she is living under the protection of sixteen thousand laws!”
“Ah, yes,” said his friend, perhaps a professional reformer of third persons, who naturally lacked a sense of humor; “but they were not enforced!”
It is not altogether inconceivable that if all the laws had been enforced the little girl’s condition would have been even worse than it was, considering how haphazard had been the process of making all those laws, and how, if set in motion, many of them would have clashed with each other.
If they were effective, the whole of human kind would have been translated, like Enoch, long ago. Of course, the assertion that they had not been enforced was the obvious retort. And it was true, because it is impossible to enforce all of them. And what is more no one believes that all the laws should be enforced, all the time,—that is, no one believes in absolute law enforcement, since no one believes that the laws should be enforced againsthim. Everybody hates a policeman just as everybody loves a fireman. And yet the fire department and the police department are composed of the same kind of men,paid the same salaries, and responsible to the same authorities. The duty of the fireman is, of course, the simpler, because there is no disagreement among men about the thing to be done. When a fire breaks out in the city, the fire department is expected to rush to the spot, to pour water on the fire, and to continue pouring water on the fire until it ceases to burn. The reforming mind seems to think that the duty of the policeman is of equal simplicity, and that when a wrong is done, the sole duty of the police consists in rushing immediately to that spot, seizing the wrongdoer, and, by confining him in a prison, thereby eradicate his tendency to do wrong, and, by holding him up as an example to others who are considering the commission of that wrong, to deter them from it.
As far as crimes are concerned, the policemen, indeed, do fairly well. Though that they succeed in any measure at all in discharging their functions is a wonder when one considers the contumely and abuse that are constantly heaped upon them in all our cities. The newspapers, when there are no accounts of crime to print—and the assumption is that crimes and casualties, if they are horrid enough, are the principal events in the annals of mankind worth chronicling—can always print suggestions of the crimes of the police. The reporter, a human being himself, dissatisfied because the policemen cannot gratify his hunger for sensation, is not to blame, perhaps; he views life from the standpoint of his own necessities, and his conception of life is of a series of exciting tragedies enacted with a view tomaking the first edition interesting, so that the ears of the populace may be assaulted in the gloom of each evening’s dusk by that hideous bellowing of the news “boy,” whose heavy voice booms through the shade like some mighty portent of disaster in the world.
This all sounds pretty hopeless, but if morals are to be wrought by and through policemen, I am sure we shall have to pay higher salaries, and procure men who are themselves so moral that their consciences are troubled only by the sins of others; there is no other way. Unless, of course, anything is left in these modern days of the theory of the development of individual character. But that is the program of a thousand years.
As for the future of municipal government in this land, I venture to set down this prediction: That no appreciable advance will be made, no appreciable advance can be made in any fundamental sense, so long as the so-called moral issue is the pivot on which municipal elections turn, or so long as it is allowed to remain to bedevil officials, to monopolize their time and to exhaust their energies, so that they have little of either left for their proper work of administration.
Either cities must have home rule, including the local police power, with the right to regulate amusements and resorts and even vices according to the will of the people in that city, whatever the rural view may be, or some authority other than the mayor, and far wiser and nobler than any mayor I ever knew or heard of, must be raised up by the statein whom may be united the powers and functions of a beadle, a censor, and a dictator. I have not the slightest idea where one so wise and pure is to be found, but doubtless there are plenty who do, if their modesty would permit them to speak.