y adroit campaign, shrewdly recognized the
importance of controlling the judiciary; in particular, they threw all
their power against the election of candidates who were known to be
Catholics, or Jews, or free-thinkers. As a result they packed the bench
of nearly every state with Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian judges,
and these gentlemen at once upheld all their maze of outrageous
statutes. That they would do so if elected was known in advance, and
yet, so far as the record shows, it was a rare thing for any one to
attack them on the ground of their religion, and rarer still for any
such attack to influence many votes. The taboo was working. The majority
of voters were eager to avoid that issue. They felt, in some vague and
unintelligible way, that it was improper to raise it.

So with all other primary issues. There is surely no country in the
world in which the marriage relation is discussed more copiously than in
the United States, and yet there is no country in which its essentials
are more diligently avoided. Some years ago, seeking to let some
sagacity into the prevailing exchange of platitudes, one of us wrote a
book upon the subject, grounding it upon the obvious doctrine that women
have much more to gain by marriage than men, and that the majority of
men are aware of it, and would never marry at all if it were not for
women's relentless effort to bring them to it. This banality the writer
supported, by dint of great painstaking, in a somewhat novel way. That
is to say, he put upon himself the limitation of employing no theory,
statement of fact or argument in the book that was not already embodied
in a common proverb in some civilized language. Now and then it was a
bit hard to find the proverb, but in most cases it was very easy, and in
some cases he found, not one, but dozens. Well, this laborious
_pastiche_ of the obvious made such a sensation that it sold better than
any other book that the author had ever written--and the reviews
unanimously described it, either with praise or with blame, as an
extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid to
be bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americans
by surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even the
peasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar to even the
literate minority over here that the book acquired a sort of sinister
repute, and the writer himself came to be discussed as a fellow