The Kendrick gazette. [volume] (Kendrick, Idaho) 1892-1968, 1915-10-29
Great Number of Useless
Laws Passed by Legislature
and City Councils

The greatest crime in the United
States is the wholesale manufacture
of criminals" says Henry B. Hyde
in the Chicago Tribune, writing a.
bout the great number of usless
laws passed by state legislature and
city councils each year. And to sup
port his indictment, Mr.. Hyde mar
shals an array of facts which fiction
cannot match.
Commenting editorally on Mr..
Hyde's charges, the Tribune says:
obviously, what Mr.. Hyde calls
the wholesale manufacture of GRIM
inals" is one of the unexpected re-
suits of our uncritical reliance upon
legislation as cure-all. When the
American sees anything he doesn't
like, his first impulse is to pass a
law against it. If there are no sta
tutes against gravitation enacted at
the vociferous behest of Americans
who have slipped up on a winters
day, it is an oversight which will be
corrected in due time.
This is an American failing which
is often commented on. Less often
do we ponder the moral phase of
the American habit of passing laws.
Undoubtedly we have been pass
ing thru a period of acute social
self-consciousness. Many things
which were ignored by our fathers
we understand, or think we under
stand the evil of, and in attempting
to express our new sense of respons-
ibility and correct the newly dis
covered faults by our favorite meth
cd of law-making. we have not
only far out-striped our capacity for
the more difficult task of admins
tration, but we have developed a
taste for correcting what seems to
be our neighbors errors which bids
fair in turn to include everything
from his choice of neckties to his
religious creed.
/ "This taste for censorship is not
discrininative. What seems to the
great mass of a given community as
at worst harmless or inconsiderable
seems to some moral specialists
heinous and deeply demoralizing.
In no country of the world to-day,
we believe, are there so many good
people who happen to be passion
ately energized over some particular
fact of our fallable human nature.
The United States is one huge ex-
ample of Herbert Spencer's simile
on reform. 1t is a titanic sheet
of metal on which the dinges are
being furiously beaten down with
the inevitable result that with al
most every blow of our laundering
hammers a new dinge is made as
the old one disappears.
"In this period of AN awakened
social conscience. We show collect
lively tendency to neurasthenia in
reform, and individually a super
sensitiveness as to other peoples
errors. If good many of our eff
forts at bettering the world over
night could be treated with dose
of humor and a sense Of proportion,
a deal os unnecessary suffering
could be avoided and some very SER
ious social reactions escaped.
"But more is needed even than
| the perfecting of law enforcement
and administrations thing more
difficult to attain. We need a check
upon our growing tendency to force
our neighbors into compliance with
our own special standards. If we are
to accept sterner and more de-
tailed social dicipline, let us at least
see that it is shaped by the common
conscience and barred on the broad
and settled convictions of the COM
munity. Let us no longer subject the
individual to the heterogeneous
tyrrany of innumerable minorities.
To much of our penal law is made
under the cover of public indiffer-
ence by that species of man or wo-
men who would have us all run into
the mold of his or her conviction.
Mrs. A. N. Patton will take a
limited number of pupils in china