In all this, the Prohibition movement has been an integral part. Prohibition has its roots in the great sixteenth century victories of fanaticism plus greed. It appeared above ground because of conditions brought about by discoveries in physical science acting upon a society coloured by the Protestant victories, although in themselves these discoveries have no inherent connection with morals. It has won a great victory in America and is attempting to invade England at the present day, when the strain of chronic industrial war has become acute and world-wide. The historical connection between Protestantism and Prohibition has been but little studied. Nevertheless its outlines are abundantly clear. Prohibition was not among the original Protestant taboos. Even the Puritans and, as far as is known, the Anabaptists (who together made up the “extreme left” among the sixteenth century sects) were not prepared to abandon Christian tradition so completely as to hold fermented drinks to be sinful. But Protestantism par excellence, that is Puritanism (from its original belief that worship was only possible through the mind and never through the senses), began by divorcing religion from beauty, and went on to a hatred of the decorative side of life and especially of the simple pleasures of the populace. The Protestant societies created modern industrialism with its masses of degraded proletarians. As discoveries in physical science intensified the evils of industrialism in general (although they did not create those evils), so in the particular case of drink the commercial distillation of “hard” liquor still further magnified the evil of intemperance. The sequence is clear in both the general and the particular case. Even in the sixteenth century, Protestantism had already produced proletarians and public drunkenness on so large a scale that the first laws against drunkenness are found under Edward VI, and under Elizabeth the first Poor Law establishing workhouses. Until Edward and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had abolished the monasteries, which supplemented the guilds in what we should call “social work,” it had not been found necessary to build workhouses for the poor nor to jail poor men who got drunk. Certainly it is clear that want, and drunkenness as the habitual result of want, were on the increase. And yet hard liquor was not plentiful in England until the very end of the seventeenth century. A few whisky distilleries had been set up in England in Henry VIII’s time but beer had continued to be the daily drink of Englishmen, and wine that of English gentlemen.