f getting justice,
and less of getting redress. When he attempts to defend himself he finds
that he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for all
purposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries,
prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapes
the laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserable
cowardice of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief, know the
game. They come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed to
cure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by
scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must be
apologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aims
by bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those
inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism and
blackmail. The history of the Mann Act offers a shining example of this
purpose. It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President
Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to
put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men
who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I.
Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against
which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly
deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of
delinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen,"
says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction now
sanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help--indeed, the means--for
their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause."[44]

But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the majority of the
learned jurist's colleagues swallowed both the statute and its
consequences.[45] There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized war
upon the alliance between the blackmailing Puritan and the
pseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It must wait until a sense of reason and
justice shows itself in the American people, strong enough to overcome
their prejudice in favour of the moralist on the one hand, and their
delight in barbarous pursuits and punishments on the other. I see but
faint promise of that change today.

Sec. 5

I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of militant Puritanism
because, so far as I know, the inquiry has not been attempted before,
and because a somewhat detailed acq