tyranny. I am
not referring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I discuss
elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next
door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral
questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to
model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that
there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a
cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits
Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. In
other words, there are States psychologically capable of making a man a
convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or having a green front-door, or
anything else that anybody chooses to fancy. There is an American
atmosphere in which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or
hanged for writing a post-card.

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American newspapers are
full of it and there is no name for it but mere madness. Indeed it is
not only mad, but it calls itself mad. To mention but one example out of
many, it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching children
to take care of their health. And it was proudly added that the children
were 'health-mad.' That it is not exactly the object of all mental
hygiene to make people mad did not occur to them; and they may still be
engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be valetudinarians
and hypochondriacs in order to make them healthy. In such cases, we may
say that the modern world is too ridiculous to be ridiculed. You cannot
caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of saner days would
have made of the daily life of a child of six, who was actually admitted
to be mad on the subject of his own health. These are not days in which
that great extravaganza could be written; but I dimly see some of its
episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the child pausing in the middle
of a cart-wheel, or when he has performed three-quarters of a
cart-wheel, and consulting a little note-book about the amount of
exercise per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or when he has
climbed exactly one-third of a tree; and then producing a clinical
thermometer to take his own temperature. But what would be the good of
imaginative logic to prove the madness of such people, when they
themselves praise it for being mad?

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of which Dickens made