My third reason is rather different in character. Every state contains fussy and pedantic moralists who seek to use its machinery to insist that these habits shall become the official standard of conduct in the population. They are interested in prohibition and uniformity for their own sake, and every success that they win only spurs them to greater efforts. If they stop the sale of alcohol, they become ardent for the limitation of the right to tobacco. They are anxious to control the publication of books, the production of plays, women’s dress, the laws governing sexual life, the use of leisure. They are terrified by what they call immorality, by which they mean behaviour of which they do not happen to approve. They are scandalized by the unconventional. They luxuriate in its denunciation. They form committees and leagues to prove the degeneracy of our times. They rush to the legislature to compel action every time they discover some exceptional incident of dubious conduct. To themselves, of course, they appear as little Calvins saving the modern Geneva from the insidious invasion of the Devil. No one, I suppose, can seriously doubt that men like Mr Comstock regard themselves as the saviours of society. They have an unlimited sense of a divinely appointed mission, and the whole of their life is set in its perspective. They are the men who find in _Candide_ the means of corrupting the mind of the community. They are horrified by the nude in art. They think the performance of _Mrs. Warren’s Profession_ the public profanation of the ideal. They regard Darwin as an “infidel” whose works were an outrage upon God; and the circumstances of Maxim Gorky’s married life seem to them to demand his public excoriation.