beginnings of the vice crusade,
the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics
(the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque Utopias, the
invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the
Mormons, the hysteria over the Breckenridge-Pollard case and other like
causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations,
the spread of zooephilia, the attack upon Mammon, the dawn of the uplift,
and last but far from least, comstockery.

In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave a sign of its
formal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a general
overhauling and tightening of the screws. The difference between the two
forms is very well represented by the difference between the program of
the half-forgotten Good Templars and the program set forth in the Webb
Law of 1913, or by that between the somewhat diffident prudery of the
40's and the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of
today. In brief, a difference between the _re_nunciation and
_de_nunciation, asceticism and Mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the
flaming sword. The distinguishing mark of the elder Puritanism, at least
after it had attained to the stature of a national philosophy, was its
appeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with the
elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. Even the rage against
slavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. The
thing that worried the more ecstatic Abolitionists was their sneaking
sense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting the
fire by letting slavery go on. The thirst to punish the concrete
slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition had
added exasperation to fervour. In most of the earlier harangues against
his practice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to grant that
slave-owner's good faith, and even to compensate him for his property.
But the new Puritanism--or, perhaps more accurately, considering the
shades of prefixes, the neo-Puritanism--is a frank harking back to the
primitive spirit. The original Puritan of the bleak New England coast
was not content to flay his own wayward carcass: full satisfaction did
not sit upon him until he had jailed a Quaker. That is to say, the
sinner who excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much himself
as his neighbour; to borrow a term from psychopathology, he was le