force men to forsake their sins. Of these it
is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any
more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a
dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you
have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not
be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put
into it.

Along with such idealists should go the strange people who seem to
think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by
repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates
had in mind. These people will say "So far from aiming at _slavery_,
the Eugenists are seeking _true_ liberty; liberty from disease and
degeneracy, etc." Or they will say "We can assure Mr. Chesterton that
the Eugenists have _no_ intention of segregating the harmless; justice
and mercy are the very motto of----" etc. To this kind of thing
perhaps the shortest answer is this. Many of those who speak thus are
agnostic or generally unsympathetic to official religion. Suppose one
of them said "The Church of England is full of hypocrisy." What would
he think of me if I answered, "I assure you that hypocrisy is
condemned by every form of Christianity; and is particularly
repudiated in the Prayer Book"? Suppose he said that the Church of
Rome had been guilty of great cruelties. What would he think of me if
I answered, "The Church is expressly bound to meekness and charity;
and therefore cannot be cruel"? This kind of people need not detain us
long. Then there are others whom I may call the Precedenters; who
flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the
solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand
the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the
principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer
"Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to
persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old
law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. He simply alters
the word "lepers" to "long-nosed people," and says blandly that the
principle is the same.

Perhaps the weakest of all are those helpless persons whom I have
called the Endeavourers. The prize specimen of them was another M.P.
who defended the same Bill as "an honest attempt" to deal with a great
evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fello