every city in the land;
then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in its
practical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandoned
at the outbreak of the Civil War, and the attempt to enforce it in a
rapidly growing list of States; then the successful onslaught upon the
Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then the
gradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or three
States permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; then
the rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of a
moving picture censorship following it; then the revival of
Sabbatarianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian invention, in
the van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexual
irregularity, with the unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical
product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion
of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its
mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its
worst. Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritan
enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat
immorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them there
was a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himself
into an offence against society. Beneath all of them there was the
dubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, of
Puritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit and
condition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitable
corollary that there are some members of the community who have a
special talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are,
and of a right ought to be, binding upon all.

Sec. 4

This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; its recognition of the
moral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under
the original Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, the chase
and punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, and
during the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only change
introduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, and
finally to the whole body of laymen. This change, however, did not
materially corrupt the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the
leader in the so-called militant field still remained the same man who
led in the spiritual field. But