Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard
enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to
appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and
women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an
interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in
existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they
create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat
disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an
inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four
appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps
four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to
set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What
is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers?

Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything
must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's
but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's
specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for
cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of
taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up
spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and
tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real
life--interesting, but easily forgotten.

The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice
the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a
taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must
make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach
any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow
support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion
is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character
rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This
is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more
and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand
times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks,
it is with a prestige that dumbs q