"This is called, in a general word, Puritanism. Our Spartans, who would not tolerate public coercive corporate powers any more than do the English, were likewise driven into an individual Puritanism, called their ἁγωγἡ, which likewise consisted of fanatic teetotalism, mutisme, anti-intellectualism, and other common features.
"This inevitable Puritanism in England assumed formerly what they call a Biblical form; now it feeds on teetotalism—that is, it has become liquid Puritanism. I have it on the most unquestionable authority, that the contemporary Britons are, in point of consumption of spirits and wine, the most moderate consumers of all the European nations; and the average French person, for example, drinks 152 times more wine per annum than the average Englishman. Even in point of beer, the average Belgian, for instance, drinks twice as much as the average Englishman; while the average Dane drinks close on five times more spirits than the average Briton.
"Yet all these facts will convert no one. For, since the Puritan wants Puritanism and not facts, he can be impressed only by inducing him to adopt another sort of Puritanism, but never by facts.
"Accordingly, they have introduced Christian Science, or one of the oldest Orphic fallacies, which the Mediæval Germans used to call 'to pray oneself sound.' They have likewise inaugurated anti-vivisectionism, vegetarianism, anti-tobacconism, Sabbatarianism, and a social class system generally, which combines all the features of all the kinds of Puritanism.
"We in Athens divided men only on lines of the greater or lesser political rights we gave them; but we never drew such lines in matters social and purely human. The freest Athenian readily shook hands with a metic or denizen; and we ate all that was eatable and good. In England the higher class looks upon the next lower as the teetotaller looks upon beer, the vegetarian upon beef, or the Sabbatarian upon what they call the Continental Sunday.
"Moreover, there is in England, in addition to the science of zoology or botany, such as my hearer Aristotle founded it, a social zoology and botany, treating of such animals and plants as cannot, according to English class Puritanism, be offered to one's friends at meals. Thus, mussels and cockles are socially ostracised, except in unrecognisable form; bread is offered in homœopathic doses; beer at a banquet is simply impossible; black radishes, a personal insult.
"In the same way, streets, squares, halls, theatres, watering-places—in short, everything in the material universe is or is not 'class'; that is, it is subject or not subject to social Puritanism. All this, as in the case of the Hebrews, who have an infinitely developed ritualism of eatables and drinkables, of things 'pure' or 'impure'; all this, I say, is the inevitable consequence of the unwillingness of the English to grant any considerable coercive power to the State, the Church, the nobility, the army, or any other organised corporate institution.
"They hate the idea of conscription, because they hate to give power to the army, and prefer to fall into the snares of faddists.
"The coercive power which they will not grant in one form, they must necessarily admit in another form. They destroy Puritanism as wielded by State or Church, and must therefore, since coercive powers are always indispensable, accept it as Puritanism of fads.
"What are the Jews other than a nation of extreme faddists? Being quite apolitical, as we call it, they must necessarily be extremely Orphic—that is, extreme Puritans.