stablished centralized and reliable police instrument whereby to effect
his reforms. The fiery American moral idealist is determined to set out
for the Kingdom of Heaven at once, but every steed he mounts proves
broken-winded, and speedily drops down by the wayside. Don Quixote sets
the lance at rest and digs his spurs into Rosinante's flanks, but he
fails to realize that, in our modern world, he will never bear him
anywhere near the foe.

If we wish to see a totally different national method of regarding
immorality we may turn to Russia. Here also we find idealism at work,
but it is not the same kind of idealism, since, far from desiring to
express itself by force, its essential basis is an absolute disbelief in
force. Russia, like France, has inherited from an ancient ecclesiastical
domination an extremely severe code of regulations against immorality
and all sexual aberrations, but, unlike France, it has not cast them off
in order to mould the laws in accordance with national temperament. The
essence of the Russian attitude in these matters is a sympathy with the
individual which is stronger than any antipathy aroused by his immoral
acts; his act is a misfortune rather than a sin or a crime. We may
observe this attitude in the kindly and helpful fashion in which the
Russian assists along the streets his fellow-man who has drunk too much
vodka, and, on a higher plane, we see the same spirit of forgiving human
tenderness in the Russian novelists, most clearly in the greatest and
most typically national, in Dostoieffsky and in Tolstoy. The harsh
rigidity of the old Russian laws had not the slightest influence, either
in changing this national attitude or in diminishing the prevalence, at
the very least as great as elsewhere, of sexual laxity or sexual
aberration. Nowadays, as Russia attains national self-consciousness,
these laws against immorality are being slowly remoulded in accordance
with the national temperament, and in some respects--as in its attitude
towards homosexuality and the introduction in 1907 of what is
practically divorce by mutual consent--they allow a freedom and latitude
scarcely equalled in any other country.[208]

Undoubtedly there is, within certain limits, mutual action and reaction
in these matters among nations. Thus the influence of France has led to
the abolition of the penalty against homosexual practices in many
countries, notably Holland, Spain, Portugal, and, more recently, Italy,
while