However, these gains for the cause of Christian liberty were by no means decisive. Although the influence of Catholicism had increased, it was by no means dominant. To this day, no Roman Catholic could be nominated for President by either of the two major parties. The Roman Catholic, the most numerous of the three Catholic communions, had not even the power which its members might otherwise have given it, because its Italian and Slavic members counted for little in the politics of the country as a whole. The Latins had an especially small foothold in public life. Beer and wine were still mainly thought of in connection with “foreign elements” in the population. The native-born drank whisky, and used the word “rum” as a generic term to designate both distilled and fermented liquors! Between them, the Protestant sects accounted for an overwhelming majority of the population, and their innate Puritanism in morals was unchanged. Their theologies were less insisted upon; most educated Protestants were abandoning the arduous labour of definition, and the fervour which had formerly gone into Protestant theological discussion was now beginning to be dissipated in vague humanitarianism. In part this Protestant energy (formerly employed upon the theology now fading from the human mind) was ready to be used for the enforcement of taboo. Chesterton’s analysis of corresponding conditions in the British Isles is pertinent here. He remarks that “... it is a singular fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilization, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilized part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays.... All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil silence in the streets.”