fun and of which educationalists make fusses. When I was in America
another newspaper produced a marvellous child of six who had the
intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and apparently one
on which the experiment turned, was that she could be made to understand
and even to employ the word 'annihilate.' When asked to say something
proving this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 'When
common sense comes in, superstition is annihilated.' In reply to which,
by way of showing that I also am as intelligent as a child of twelve,
and there is no arrested development about me, I will say in the same
elegant diction, 'When psychological education comes in, common sense is
annihilated.' Everybody seems to be sitting round this child in an
adoring fashion. It did not seem to occur to anybody that we do not
particularly want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating
superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk like a child of
twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a man of fifty, or even a man
of fifty to talk like a fool. And on the principle of hoping that a
little girl of six will have a massive and mature brain, there is every
reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a magnificent and
bushy beard.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American
cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce
psychoanalysis--that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I
confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine democratic spirit
of the mass. I can only suggest, in concluding this chapter, two
possible causes rather peculiar to America, which may have made this
great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so
manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea.

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Puritanism merely in
the sense of Prohibitionism. The truth is that prohibitions might have
done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not
arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and
progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the
prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they
can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive
Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not
limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the
restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever r