ll criticism and opposition without argument, and proceed to the
business of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and terrorizing weak
officials, and of forcing legislation of their own invention through
City Councils and State Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is their
chief source of strength. They combat objection with such violence and
with such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more
astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly profess
conversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over to
prohibition in the "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out much
longer. The result is that the "investigation" of the social evil
becomes an orgy, and that the ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice
commission" is made up of two parts sensational fiction and three parts
platitude. Of all the vice commissions that have sat of late in the
United States, not one has done its work without the aid of these
singularly confident experts, and not one has contributed an original
and sagacious idea, nor even an idea of ordinary common sense, to the
solution of the problem.

I need not go on piling up examples of this new form of Puritan
activity, with its definite departure from a religious foundation and
its elaborate development as an everyday business. The impulse behind it
I have called a _Wille zur Macht_, a will to power. In terms more
homely, it was described by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer,"
and in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on the gratuitous
assumption of infallibility. But even stronger than the Puritan's belief
in his own inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. In other
words, he has an ineradicable liking for cruelty in him: he is a
sportsman even before he is a moralist, and very often his blood-lust
leads him into lamentable excesses. The various vice crusades afford
innumerable cases in point. In one city, if the press dispatches are to
be believed, the proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued with
such ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. And in another
city, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects that
there were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, a
distinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referred
to it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such
disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. It