After the Civil War, American industrialism began to expand enormously. The “captain of industry,” the second partner to the sixteenth century alliance against tradition, was growing into a giant. Insufficient support in this quarter seems to have been a contributing cause of the failure of the first American Prohibition movement. This flourished for a time about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the work of pure fanaticism, and for a time it had great success. All the New England States, plus New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and South Dakota, passed State prohibition laws. But in a few years these laws began to be repealed. Finally, the Maine Law alone remained on the statute books ... and continued to be so often violated in practice as to be a laughing-stock to the whole country. Naturally, the fanatics could not have won even their temporary successes without the aid of other sorts of men. From the first America had been a “hard liquor” country. Whisky and rum had been the national drinks, and drunkenness had been common. The saloon keeper, like most traffickers in Protestant countries, was but little restrained by public opinion. “Business was business.” Wine was a luxury for the rich, unknown to the populace, and beer seems to have been almost unknown. The frontier, with its tendency toward crudity of thought and its utter lack of social restraint, has deeply influenced the American mind, predisposing it toward rough-hewn solutions of any troublesome problem, thus reinforcing the dominant Protestantism of the country, with its reliance upon taboo. As yet the influence of Catholicism with its rounded, universal ethic was slight. But notwithstanding all these contributing forces, a short experience of Prohibition was quite enough for the unhappy States which tried it. Not until after the early years of the twentieth century did the agitation again gather strength. In the interim, new forces had appeared, some favourable, some opposed to the destruction of Christian liberty. On the surface, it appeared to many that liberty had been strengthened. Catholicism was growing, chiefly through immigration from Ireland, Italy and the Slavic countries. Immigrants from Germany began to brew beer, so that even the populace began to see there was a possible rival to hard liquor. California began to make wine. With the disappearance of the frontier, men believed that the crudity of mind bred by frontier conditions would soon be resolved into an appreciation of the necessary complexities of settled civilization. So far, this idea has since been proved mistaken, but, in itself, it was not ridiculous. Far sillier was another contemporary notion, namely, that the increasing ease and frequency of communication would bring about catholicity of mind and a decline of particularism and provincialism in general.