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.
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