The moral gladiators, in brief, know the
game. They come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed to
cure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by
scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must be
apologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aims
by bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those
inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism and
blackmail. The history of the Mann Act offers a shining example of this
purpose. It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President
Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to
put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men
who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I.
Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against
which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly
deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of
delinquency even less honest.
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