ary of Americanisms,"[41] that even "bull" was softened to
"male cow." This was the Golden Age of euphemism, as it was of euphuism;
the worst inventions of the English mid-Victorians were adopted and
improved. The word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, verging close
upon downright libel; legs became the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach
began to run from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons faded into
"unmentionables"; the newspapers spun their parts of speech into such
gossamer webs as "a statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute"
and "an interesting condition." And meanwhile the Good Templars and Sons
of Temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts.
There was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affecting
exhibit of reformed drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed to a
travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed the
pledge. The National House of Representatives took recess after recess
to hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and more than a dozen of
its members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic
heathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerable
Chautauquan caravan of later years.

Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep and
swift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion which
historians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but which
showed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. Its true quality was
moral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a
supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation. The
crack of that great spark emptied the jar; the American people forgot
all about their pledges and pruderies during the four years of Civil
War. The Good Templars, indeed, were never heard of again, and with them
into memory went many other singular virtuosi of virtue--for example,
the Millerites. But almost before the last smoke of battle cleared away,
a renaissance of Puritan ardour began, and by the middle of the 70's it
was in full flower. Its high points and flashing lighthouses halt the
backward-looking eye; the Moody and Sankey uproar, the triumphal entry
of the Salvation Army, the recrudescence of the temperance agitation and
its culmination in prohibition, the rise of the Young Men's Christian
Association and of the Sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of
the Christian Endeavour movement, the