or. And being poor, they subscribed to a
_Sklavenmoral_. That is to say, they were spiritually humble. Their eyes
were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but upon the long and rocky
road ahead of them. Their moral passion spent most of its force in
self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. They began by howling
their sins from the mourners' bench; they came to their end, many of
them, in the supreme immolation of battle.

But out of the War came prosperity, and out of prosperity came a new
morality, to wit, the _Herrenmoral_. Many great fortunes were made in
the War itself; an uncountable number got started during the two decades
following. What is more, this material prosperity was generally
dispersed through all classes: it affected the common workman and the
remote farmer quite as much as the actual merchant and manufacturer. Its
first effect, as we all know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in
pretensions, a comforting feeling that the Republic was a success, and
with it, its every citizen. This change made itself quickly obvious, and
even odious, in all the secular relations of life. The American became a
sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of
himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. And on the
ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same
sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and
offensively. The religion of the American thus began to lose its inward
direction; it became less and less a scheme of personal salvation and
more and more a scheme of pious derring-do. The revivals of the 70's had
all the bounce and fervour of those of half a century before, but the
mourners' bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, and in its
place appeared the collection basket. Instead of accusing himself, the
convert volunteered to track down and bring in the other fellow. His
enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call
service. In brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually
superimposed itself upon the national Puritanism, and from that marriage
sprung a keen _Wille zur Macht_, a lusty will to power.[42] The American
Puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he
felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and
multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free,
universal and compulsory. He had the men, he had the guns and he had the
mon