Gideons plans to make
every traveller read the Bible (American Revised Version!) whether he
will or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulent
devotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise the
Decalogue and the Beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade.

Thus the national energy which created the Beef Trust and the Oil Trust
achieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and by
exactly the same methods. One needs be no psychologist to perceive in
all this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust for
staggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented and
the prodigious. Many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soon
lost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the Y. M.
C. A., which is now no more than a sort of national club system, with
its doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (I have drunk
cocktails in Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed.)
But while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sport
in one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even took
on a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was that the lamp of
American Puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp
became converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, with
flames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood
at the hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new will to power,
working in the true Puritan as in the mere religious sportsman,
stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps
unequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militant
morality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elder
art of iniquity.

If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal Act, on March 3, 1873, as
a starting point, the legislative stakes of this new Puritan movement
sweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann and Webb Acts,
in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the Seventh Commandment
with a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelming
power of the Federal Government behind the enforcement of the
prohibition laws in the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once recalls
the salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon
"vicious" literature, begun by Comstock and the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to