We may take this place to add in a single sentence what The Outlook thinks s the duty of the present Congress: To ratify and confirm the promises already made by the President to the Filipinos and thus give to those promises a National authority; to increase the army as requested by the President; to provide for the increased efficiency of the Civil Service Commission for the increased work put upon it by our foreign policy; to confirm the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and put in train the necessary measures for the construction of an open and National highway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; to repeal those of the internal war taxes which inflict special vexation on the people and yield small return, such as the express and telegraph stamp tax; to leave further reduction of taxes until the whole question of internal and customs taxes and the proper adjustment between the two can be carefully considered; and to postpone indefinitely any bill which proposes to encourage shipping by paying bonuses out of the National Treasury to shipping merchants or ship-builders.

people of the Philippines. To give to measures devised for our own financial interest precedence over a measure designed to give justice to a dependent people is a course so manifestly indefensible that it can hardly be the subject of legitimate debate.

What the political rights of the Filipinos are may be a fair question for public discussion; but certainly the Filipinos have a right to know what the American people intend to do with them if they should accept the sovereignty of the American Nation. A part of them have already done so,' either in the spirit of general confidence and trust in the American people or because they are hopeless of securing independence for themselves. Others are still in arms against us. Surely, alike those who are in arms against us, and those who are not, have a right to ask us to tell them, formally, officially, and authoritatively, what our policy will be in case the former should lay down their arms and the whole people should submit themselves to our authority. The President has given such assurances as it is possible for him to give, but he has truly told them that Congress alone can bind

gress

If the prophecies of the daily press may be relied upon, it is the determination of a portion of the Republican party in Congress, and before this reaches our readers it may prove to be the decision of the Republican party as a whole, to give the ship subsidy bill, and perhaps the bill for reducing the war taxes, precedence over every other measure, including Senator Spooner's measure providing civil government

more intelligent of the Filipinos understand this well; and the first duty of Congress, the duty which should take precedence of every other duty, is to determine what the relations of the Filipinos as a subject people shall be to the United States, what rights and privileges shall be guaranteed to them in case they lay down all arms, cease all resistance, and accept the protection of our flag and the responsibilities which loyalty to that flag involves.

be pursued, it would go far toward justifying the charges of the Democratic party in the late campaign that the Republican party is dominated by the money power. We do not here question the wisdom of reducing the war taxes; we think such reduction is wise. We do not debate the wisdom of the ship subsidy bill; elsewhere we state our objections to it. But it is perfectly clear that both these measures are planned to promote the financial interests of the American people, while the Spooner

Bill

The best, indeed the only, argument for a State Constabulary bill which we have seen is contained in a letter by the Rev. T. A. Hendrick, a Roman Catholic clergyman of Rochester, published in a recent issue of the Brooklyn "Eagle." He refers to and quotes a decision of the New York Court of Appeals to the effect that police officers are State officers fulfilling a State

duty, not properly agents or officers of the city, although they are appointed by the city. Although their appointment is municipal, their function is a State function. Basing his argument on this decision, Father Hendrick contends that these officers both may and should receive their appointment from the State. He would evidently have the bill general in its provisions, so as to apply not only to all the cities but to all the incorporated villages. In this respect he appears to us to be absolutely right; that is, if such a force is organized at all, it should be organized for the entire State, not merely for the city of New York. Father Hendrick's position is thus stated by himself:

It is my belief that a State constabulary will be a better constabulary, for the police will be in a very large measure independent of the very influences that now corrupt them. The

police will be better because they will be permitted to be better; and it is my experience that policemen, like other citizens, are for law and order, when permitted, and are not proud to be the tools of criminals in gold-braided uniforms. It is my belief that the police will be better because they will be compelled to be better, and it will be the pride of every officer to do his duty, for in that policy only will be safety. It is my belief that the police will be better because it will be possible to place the index finger upon the culprit who impedes the operation of even and exact justice, to drag him forth and, having held him up as an example, to kick him in shame from the service. But the State constabulary will be a mighty step in advance of the best now in the State, and I hope to see it speedily brought into being, not only in the larger cities, but in every part of the State. I hope to see the comicopera constabulary that now exists in the country towns replaced by one that will be respected by respectable people and feared by criminals.

We report this letter here as a means of giving to our readers the strongest statement we have found in favor of a policy, we disapprove. We supplement it by adding, as further arguments in favor of such a policy, that the police appointed under it would be free from local influences; they could be transferred from one section to another of the State in case of suspicion of corruption; and in case mob violence were threatened at any time they could be united in a body to do the work now done by untrained sheriffs' deputies, and save calling in the militia.

But that the proposed measure is a radical departure from the traditions, if not the principles, of American government is very

certain. The whole fabric of the Republic is built upon the principle of local selfgovernment. The individual is left to take care of his own personal interests; the township is similarly left to care for township int rests, the county for county interests, the State for State interests, and, finally, only those matters are reserved for the Federal Government which, in the nature of the case, cannot be provided for by the individual, the town, the county, or the State. It is not always easy to draw sharply and clearly the line between local and more than local interests. The encouragement of immorality and vice and the corruption of the government in New York City affects injuriously the State. But if there is any subject-matter which by common consent and universal usage in America is left to the locality, it is the determination and execution of the measures necessary for its own self-protection, except as extraordinary circumstances justify it in calling for aid. The police

man is not more a State officer than the sheriff, but the sheriff is elected by the county. And the county depends upon the sheriff for the enforcement of the law, unless he proves either incompetent or unequal to the task; only in that case is he supplanted or reinforced by the State. The same principle would leave the city to protect itself until the police authorities proved themselves incompetent or unequal to the task, and only in that case, and only for the temporary exigency, would the State interfere. A State police bill giving the control of the police of the cities to a State Board would be a departure from this fundamental principle of American government, much as was the ill-conceived Force Bill, by which it was proposed to substitute Federal for State control in the Southern States.

It

The reason for the adoption of this principle in the American Republic is very easy to see. It was due to the peril involved in concentrating too great power in the hands of a single executive, Federal or State. This peril still exists. is, in leed, no longer a military peril; it is purely political, but it is no less real, and possibly not much less serious, on that account. The liberties of the American people will not be seized by highway robbery with force of arms; it is not so certain that they may not be stealthily

stolen by shrewd sneak-thieves. The fears of militarism we believe to be entirely groundless; not so the fears of bureaucracy. And to create a State constabulary large enough to furnish ade

would go further and demand the extension of local option to the cities by wards or by election districts.

lages of the State, and give the control of it to the Governor, would be to add very large political power to a bureaucracy which is already too powerful. It is better to endure the evils of a corrupted police until, by an awakened public sentiment, they can be remedied, than to endeavor to escape them by so perilous a departure from American traditions, taken in haste, perhaps to be repented at leisure. Experience confirms this counsel of caution. For whenever the appointment of police has been transferred from the city to the State authorities, as recently in the law bringing the police of St. Louis under control of the State of Missouri, the result has been disastrous.

as

to

The remedy for the extraordinary conditions which exist in the city of New York is to be looked for in the opposite direction-in an extension, not a restriction, of home rule. The best thing a Republican Legislature could do would be to give to the cities the local option already given to the villages and towns, and to extend it somewhat, so authorize each ward in any city of the State to vote whether or not it would allow any sale of liquor in the ward during certain prescribed hours of the week-day, and, similarly, to determine whether or not it would allow any such sale within certain prescribed hours of Sunday. Much of the present trouble in New York City is due to the fact that the rural population insists upon forcing on the cities a temperance law to which the city populations are hostile, and which therefore the city authorities will not and cannot be made to enforce. The remedy is not in attempting to enforce such legislation against the public sentiment of the cities; it is in allowing the cities to determine for themselves what shall be the liquor restrictions within the respective municipalities. All the cities of the State ought to make common cause against any State police bill intended to bring the police of the cities or any of them under State control. It would be a great advantage to the cause of good morals if they

Vice

The war against vice in New York City is of interest to more than the citizens of the metropolis. The conditions which exist in New York exist in every great city; they are a natural result of the unnatural herding together of so great a population in so small a geographical area. Under the conditions which exist in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, in London, Paris, and Vienna, it is difficult to maintain good physical sanitation; it is still more difficult to maintain good moral sanitation. In such a campaign the moral reformer must be equally careful neither to lower his ethical standards nor to expect government to realize them. In moral reform there are always two forces to be invoked that of persuasion, acting on the individual conscience; that of law, by penalty coercing the will. The second force must not be asked to do the work of the first, nor the first the work of the second.

Our first and paramount demand is that law be not permitted to make difficult if not impossible the work of individual and social reform. We have no right to ask that law shall prevent all vice; but we have a right to ask that it prevent such encouragement of and such enticements to vice as make it supremely difficult to persevere in the way of virtue. Above all, we have a right to demand that officers of the law who receive in the right hand salaries for protecting honest citizens from the criminal classes shall not receive with the left hand money for protecting the criminal classes from honest citizens.

We have no right to ask that law prevent all drinking or even all excessive drinking. One portion of the community-the total abstainers-have no right to impose by law their standard of morality on another portion of the community-the moderate drinkers. But when the community has decided what limitations shall be put on the free sale of liquor, it has a right to insist that those limitations shall be re

garded by the men who carry on the traffic and enforced by the officers appointed for that purpose. We have no right to prohibit all games of chance for money. Whatever evil may come from a game of whist in a private parlor for dimes or quarters, the evil to the community at large is so indirect and remote that the right of the community by its police to enter the private parlor and stop the game may well be doubted. But it has a right to prohibit and prevent the professional gaming-house whither the unwary are decoyed and where they are robbed, and to insist that officers of the law shall not share in the profits of such houses. It is not possible for law to prevent all licentiousness. But it certainly is possible for it to prevent open solicitation to vice upon the public streets, and support of promoters of vice by officers of the law, for a consideration. It is possible to make it as safe for a woman to walk the streets without peril of insult as for a man to walk the streets without peril of assault. That this is possible was proved under Mayor Strong's administration. During his mayoralty women walked the streets of the East Side in as much safety as they would walk the streets of a New England village. No man of chivalrous nature will be content with any lower standard of public order on all the public streets of the city. The moral reformers are jeered at as doctrinaires and impracticables who demand the impossible. They demand nothing which has not been proved possible. Their demands are very moderate. They demand, to use Mr. Gladstone's famous phrase, that the law make vice difficult and virtue easy, and they complain that as now administered it makes vice easy and virtue difficult.

There is much less danger that moral reformers in this crusade will make extravagant demands than that they will yield to demands which are unjust and immoral. The moralist has no right to demand that the law attempt to make the community moral. He has a right to demand that it prohibit the continuance of open, palpable, and flagrant conditions which make the maintenance of morality well-nigh impossible. And he has a right to insist that under no circumstances shall the law put its guerdon around immorality and give it sanction and protection. This is the one conclusive objection

against all schemes for licensing prostitution or segregating it in a ward or district and allowing it free course there. Licensing prostitution protects vice and endeavors to make it safe; segregating those who traffic in vice protects vice and endeavors to make it convenient. What conceivable right has law to dedicate, though with their consent, certain women to a life of infamy? If there are any inalienable rights, surely a woman's right to her purity is one of them. She cannot alienate it. It is inconceivable to us that any civilized man should be willing that the government for which he is responsible should approve and indorse such a self-surrender by a woman to a life of shame. What man who reads these lines would consent that his sister, his daughter, any woman he ever cared for, should be thus set aside by government to such a profession? Or who would vote to have the ward in which he lives fenced off as the district where vice might have free course unhindered and untrammeled? And if no man would willingly permit his own ward to become such a moral ghetto, by what right does he convert into a pestilential district the ward of his unfortunate neighbor? We cannot prevent all vice; but we can at least refuse to be made indorsers and protectors of vice. Is it said, We license saloons, why not houses of vice? the answer is: All drinking is not wrong; all licentiousness is. Drinking is to be regulated, and therefore within limits permitted; even the prohibitionist. admits so much as this, since he permits selling for medical and sacramental purposes. But licentiousness is not to be regulated; it is wrong and always wrong. If the law cannot always prevent it, nor even prohibit it in all its forms, the law can at least avoid approving and protecting it. It is no part of the function of the law to make vice either safe, respectable, or convenient.

If segregation and license could accomplish all their advocates claim, the moral reformer would have the best of grounds for opposing so immoral a use of law. But experience proves that neither method will accomplish what its advocates claim. It is not the moral reformer who is the doctrinaire; the doctrinaire is he who advocates compromise with and protection to vice, for it is he who forms his

enter.

theories in oblivion of the teachings of history. Segregation was tried in Rome about the middle of the nineteenth century. A district was selected to be given over to the prostitutes. Its bounds were defined; its women were uniformed; a cordon of police guarded the boundaries; stores were opened in the immediate vicinity to secure adequate supply of the wants of the residents. Women entered, vice entered, thieves and vagabonds of all descriptions entered; but customers of vice would not The district became a plague-spot, but the plague did not remain encysted there. The police were evaded; the compulsory uniforms were discarded; the imprisoned women made their escape to ply their traffic elsewhere; and the experiment, after a trial under circumstances far more favorable to its success than could ever be secured in New York, was pronounced by the Church authorities, under whose direction it had been attempted, "a stupendous failure." The failure of licensing vice has been as conclusive as the failure of segregating it. Nowhere has licensing of vice been carried out so fully or under authority so likely to achieve good results, if such a perversion of law could ever achieve good results, as in Paris. The administrator of this system reports that out of thirty thousand abandoned women in Paris, less than oneseventh took out the license, and not only the vice, but the disease which it propagates and promotes, continually increased under the system. Wise men learn by the experience of others, fools have to learn by their own. New York would indeed be a fool if, after the experiments of Rome, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin abroad, and of St. Louis and Cleveland at home, it were to repeat a method which can no longer be legitimately termed an experi

ment.

What we need in New York is, first, a public sentiment which will not indorse any legal compromise with lawlessness nor any use of laws to give indorsement or protection to vice, and, next, an administration which will honestly endeavor to do all that by law can be done to make vice difficult and virtue easy. This accomplished, we may safely leave moral influences to do the work of individual reform on which the social reform of the city must finally depend.

The Spirit of Paul

Do you think you have fairly answered the article on "Christianity as a Dogma" in your issue of November 17? You see the weak point in it, namely, the part bringing in the parables, but have you parried the thrust of the main contention, that early Christianity was not a life but a dogma? When I was a boy, I was working with my uncle in a field, when a stranger stepped up to us with a tale of a large sum of money in England awaiting an heir. The stranger told my uncle that a share of the treasure could be secured by paymen-much for little; glory for faith; the ment of a small sum. So Paul appealed to visions of the Apocalypse for belief in the vicarious sacrifice. Has any method been discovered of swaying the masses but in an appeal to self-interest? The Tammany leader, through his Catholic education, is a direct, though degenerate, descendant of Paul. He says, "I have carried my district; Croker will give me a plum, and damn the man that worked against me." Paul says, "I have finished my course. I have fought a good fight. Henceforth there is a crown for me. As for Alexander the coppersmith, the Lord reward him according to his works." Where is the essential difference between them? Asheville, N. C.

JOHN G. LOW.

This letter furnishes an interesting and striking illustration of a common misunderstanding, not only of Paul but of all spiritual writers. How Paul could be so misunderstood passes our comprehension. We vainly endeavor to understand by what intellectual process a selfish materialism is imported into an utterance so sublimely and simply spiritual.

Paul is in Rome, and, as he believes, is about to die. The sacrifice of his life draws to its completion in his approaching martyrdom. And he writes to his young friend and disciple to tell him so, and in writing tells him how life appears as he glances backward over it, and how death appears as he looks through it to what lies beyond. "I am now," he says, " already being offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished the course; I have kept the faith: henceforth is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." Surely there ought not to be any difficulty in understanding what he means, if one will but take the trouble to read what elsewhere and to others Paul has written.

He has described the good fight: "In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. . . . For the good that I would, I do not but the evil which I would not, that I do."