“By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was ‘seen’ going into a bank.... The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one ... it is defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply tested ... if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo....”[42] By the close of the century a new and increasingly powerful ally, industrialism, was coming to the help of American Puritanism in its opposition to traditional Christian liberty. After 1865 America began to concentrate her energies on building factories and railroads. For three hundred years there had been no universal religious organization binding all men together in a common morality. In such a society, the appearance of machine industry aggravated the evils of unlimited competition between individuals and classes. These evils, it should be repeated, were the direct result of the sixteenth century moral change, that is the breakdown of universal religious authority and the consequent weakening of moral solidarity between men. Machine industry neither created the evils of unrestricted competition nor essentially changed their character. But it did aggravate them enormously because it increased the size of the industrial unit and thereby reduced to a vanishing point the personal contact between owners and wage earners. Owner and industrial wage earner tended to look upon one another less and less as fellow beings, engaged for mutual benefit in common tasks, more and more as abstract commodities—if not as definitely hostile forces, “capital” and “labour.” Wage earners organized themselves into unions which were ultimately to develop great powers of economic obstruction, but, so far, no faculty for constructive reform of industry. Owners meanwhile cast about how they might make of “labour” a more effective instrument for their own enrichment.