and nourished by the presence of men
and materials. Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long
arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into
its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has
created the Puritan _entrepreneur_, the daring and imaginative organizer
of Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of
new austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters of
marque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the
moral _Junker_, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there
has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the
new Holy Office.

Poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not
excepting the spiritual, and even the original Puritans, for all their
fire, felt its throttling caress. I think it is Bill Nye who has
humorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams all
winter that they would have strength enough to plant corn, and how they
had to hoe corn all summer that they would have strength enough to dig
clams. That low ebb of fortune worked against the full satisfaction of
their zeal in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it kept them but
ill-prepared for the cost of offensive enterprise: even their occasional
missionarying raids upon the Indians took too much productive energy
from their business with the corn and the clams. And on the other hand,
it kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that for
every Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, of course, is no
discredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. The man
oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more
ambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he is
also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the
secure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of the
sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worst
manifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tend
to take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by no arbitrary fiat,
indeed, that the brothers of all the expiatory orders are vowed to
poverty. History teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come to them by
chance, has put an end to their soul-searching. The Puritans of the
elder generations, with few exceptions, were poor. Nearly all Americans,
down to the Civil War, were po