has been deprived of the absolute power which once made it a cesspool of corruption, and a small and efficient Board of Estimates now does most of its old work. In other cities—nearly 150 of them—the Council has been abolished altogether, and a board of three or four men has taken its place. Membership upon such boards is attractive to first-rate men—men who would not think of entering a City Council. And the people, watching three or four men, can see what each of them is doing. It is difficult to keep tabs upon 30 or 40 councilmen, or 100 Legislators, too often it is impossible to distinguish between an honest vote and a bought vote. But it is easy to keep tabs upon three or four commissioners. [22 May 1911]
USELESS LAWS
The estimable Wegg, of Belair, continues to flood the Harford county hinterland with his tears. Not until the Back River resorts are turned into Chautauquas and the plain people who patronize them are pumped full of pink lemonade will he have done with his wailing and get the sleep he needs. Wegg has never been to Back River—he is, I take it, rather proud of the fact—but that, of course, doesn’t disqualify him as a critic. All day Sunday he broods over the crimes of those happy beer drinkers, flying-horse jockeys, fried-fish eaters, wife-beaters and child-stealers, and by the time night comes he is entirely fluid. But by Monday morning he is always well enough to dispatch, by special courier, an indignant letter to THE EVENING SUN.
One of those letters got into print yesterday, and—to adopt without shame an orthodox lie—it has just been called to my attention. In it Wegg makes the admission that it is not “sin, as such,” that inflames him, but “the open, bare-faced violation, not to say defiance, of statute law.” In other words, the act itself is not so bad, but the fact that it is forbidden by statute makes it heinous. With all due respect to a distinguished moralist I must permit myself the word “bosh!” Certainly the cause of the virtuosi of virtue is in extremis when they must bolster it up with any such idle absurdity.
As a matter of fact, no law carries within itself any mysterious inviolability. The thing which makes a law worthy of respect and which gives it, in practice, the respect of decent men, is its essential reasonableness, its direct and certain appeal to the good sense of the community, its practical social usefulness. One such good law is that which prohibits murder. Now and then the best citizen, for private reasons, may lament that it is on the books and even question its wisdom, but on the whole it is approved by the vast majority of folk without reservation, and they believe that its repeal would work them harm. The man who violates it commits a definite offense against the community: he strikes at that security which is at the bottom of civilization.
But it must be apparent that the statute books of most communities are overloaded with laws which have no such reasonableness behind them—laws which represent, not the community’s sane effort to protect itself, but the bumptious yearning of one part of the community to boss some other part. Of such sort were the sumptuary laws of old England, by which Parliament prescribed, in great detail, just what clothing the common people should wear, and just what victuals they should eat. Of that sort, too, were those Puritan laws of Massachusetts which forbade a man to feed his hogs or kiss his wife on Thanksgiving Day. And of the same sort is that law of Maryland which forbids free citizens to go fishing on Sunday or to look at moving-pictures, or to play baseball, or to buy cigars, or to drink beer (or even soda water), or to do any of 100 other things which, in themselves, are no more indecent or disorderly or anti-social than the act of swatting a fly.
Such laws invade the rights of every citizen whose tastes run to the things they forbid, and so he is perfectly justified in violating them not only occasionally but persistently and as a matter of lofty principle. Wegg himself, I daresay, has bought soda water in his time on Sunday—and yet he must have known that it was unlawful. No doubt he has also bought Sunday newspapers on Sunday, and ice and milk, and perhaps candy for the children—and yet the sale of all these things was and is specifically forbidden. In the same way and in the exercise of the same freedom the folk who go to Back River buy beer and fried fish on Sunday. The act, true enough, is unlawful, but the answer is that the law forbidding it is even more unlawful, in the higher and better sense of that term.
Wegg tries to confuse the issue by comparing Sunday drinkers to prisoners in the penitentiary, arguing that the former, like the latter, cannot be trusted to govern themselves or even to decide what they want. Here we have an echo of that absurd presumption which causes a prohibitionist to bawl for local option when the majority is for prohibition and to denounce it—as at Back River—when the majority is against prohibition. In brief, the doctrine is laid down that drinkers are inherently immoral—that they form a class distinctly inferior to teetotalers. It may be so, but you will have a hard time convincing most fair men that it is, for their experience of life teaches them that no such difference exists.
A few more words and I leave Wegg to his smug idols. He argues, in one place, that I have been unjust to the present crusaders—that they demand, not a state of universal coma on Sunday, but merely the observance of the liquor and gambling laws. He even hints that they are not opposed to Sunday baseball, Sunday tennis and so on. If that is true, I should like to hear a specific statement of the fact. Meanwhile, I deny it and in support of my denial point to history. The same crusaders who now denounce Back River have denounced every other invasion of the blue laws. They are opposed to Sunday baseball as well as to Sunday drinking, to Sunday concerts as well as to Sunday gambling. There is upon the statute books of Maryland at present a law which forbids any man, upon penalty of a heavy fine, to give a public performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Baltimore on Sunday. If any crusader in good standing will sign a petition for the repeal of that atrocious law, I shall be glad to offer him my abject apologies and to buy him a box of five-cent cigars.
But how do such laws get upon the books? If the majority of intelligent men are opposed to them, how are they forced through our Legislatures, and how is every effort to repeal them blocked? Wegg does not actually frame these questions, but his letter asks them. The answer is to be sought in the superior frenzy of the moralists, in their vast talent for making a noise, in their extraordinary skill as wire-pullers and browbeaters. That skill enabled them to get the Anti-Canteen law through Congress—aided and abetted by the natural cowardice and stupidity of politicians.2 Four-fifths of all the officers of the army were in favor of the canteen. Two-thirds of the members of Congress, I am told, were also in favor of it. And yet the crusaders knocked it out, and the army suffers thereby today, and will continue to suffer until the fates give us, by chance, a Congress unalarmed by bawling. [4 August 1911]
STEALING LIBERTY
Discoursing lately, with great rage and eloquence, upon the moral mania which now afflicts this fair land, and particularly this fair city, I ventured the view that a plain fallacy was at the bottom of it, but did not go to the length of revealing that fallacy. In response to many polite requests from the clergy and laity, I now do so. It is the fallacy of assuming, as an axiom of morals, that a man’s duty to his neighbors is superior to his duty to himself, that whenever his own desires come into conflict with theirs, he is bound to yield to theirs.
As a matter of fact no such grotesque and homicidal excess of social responsibility is laid upon the individual by any really civilized society. He has, true enough, a duty to his neighbors, but it is a duty rigidly limited and defined. He is bound to do nothing that will endanger their lives or imperil their property. He is bound to respect their liberties so long as the exercise of those liberties does not invade his own. But he is not bound to yield himself docilely to their mere whims and prejudices. He is not bound to obey their mandates in his private life. He is not bound to put their theory of what he ought to do above his own theory of what he wants to do.
Many moralists forget, or, if they remember it, try to conceal it, that this republic was founded as a protest against the very militant morality they now advocate. The colonists who came here did not object to respecting the rights of the majority they left at home; what they did object to was the need of respecting the mere opinions of the majority. Those opinions, it happened,
