It is but fair to say that the “captains of industry” were not altogether cold-blooded in the matter. They had conceived a horrible affection for the new and vast forces under their control, and in this they were imitated by their numerous admirers among people whom a European would call middle class. Such people not only permitted the mechanizing of life, they actively encouraged it. Consequently, as Henry Adams put it: “The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions, or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs, without breaking his neck.”[43] That the worship of the new mechanical energies was ruining the nerves of wealthy and middle-class Americans and imperilling society as a whole was an idea only just beginning to dawn. Almost all educated people consented to the inhuman process and called it fine names like “progress” and “efficiency.” Meanwhile, despite Henry Adams and his “typical American man,” the wage earner who constituted the great majority of the industrial communities did not take kindly to the perpetual speeding-up process. From time to time he took refuge from his monotonous machine tending in heavy drinking of hard liquor after a fashion unknown to the Catholic peasant societies of Europe, and this habit of his annoyed the captains of industry and infuriated the Puritans. The solution adopted would have amazed our ancestors. We can only hope that, if record is preserved, it will scandalize our descendants. Instead of striving to restore a state of things in which normal men might be left in peace to get their living and enjoy the social pleasures natural to man, it seemed simpler and more desirable to the leaders of our time to attempt to destroy the social pleasure. As in the sixteenth century, the “business community,” to whom the chief end of man was to make money, joined hands with the fanatic to whom amusement was sinful. Two other lesser factors came in, as if accidentally, and helped the Prohibition cause.