view raw text
. , j , . j . J j , , - . j , J j j 1 1 i I i MODERN PROFESSIONAL REFORMERS A hot yearning to rowel and punish some one preferably a sinner, but failing that, anyone handy is one of the distinguishing marks of the American. The energies which the Germans -put into bacchanalian and military enterprises, and the- English into Idle sport and vapid charity, are chiefly devoted, in this fair land, to moral endeavor and particularly to punitive moral endeavor. The nation i.-i forever in the throes of loud, barbaric campaigns against this, sin or that. It is difficult to think of a human act that has not been denounced and combated at sometime or other. Thousands of self-consecrated archangels go roaring from one end of the country to the other, raising the posse comitatns against the rum demon, or cocaine, or the hobble skirt, or Mormonism, or the cigarette, or horse: racing, or bucketshops, or vivisection or divorce, or the army canteen, or profanity, or race, .suicide, or moving picture shows, or graft, or the Negro, or the trn?ts.. cr Sunday recreations,, or dance halls, or child labor. The management of such crusades is a well organized and highly remunerative business; it enlists a great multitude of "snide" preachers and; unsuccessful lawyers and converts tliem into public characters of the first eminence. Candidates for public office are forced to join in the bellowing: objectors are crushed with accusations of personal guilt; inquisitorial and unconstitutional laws are put upon the statute books; the courts, always so flabby under a democracy, are bullied into complaisance; In the large cities, of course, there is considerable opposition to . these Puritanical .frenzies, if only on the ground that they hurt .trade, but the laws of most American cities, it must be remembered, are not made by their citizens, but by peasant legislators from -the country districts,, and no. protest can ever prevail against the rural madness for chemical purity. II. L. Mencken in Smart Set.
