The first of these accidents was a shift of political power in the South. Until about 1890 the “quality,” i.e., people who had a tradition of wealth and social ascendancy, dominated Southern politics. “Politics” were “qualities,” so the saying went. Then came a change; the small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers gained control. The quality in the South are usually “Episcopalian,” and anything but Puritanical. The “plain people” are nearly all “hardshell” Baptists or “shoutin’” Methodists. Neither of these sects are Calvinists like the original Puritans, but both are aggressively Puritan in their discipline. The Baptists are the indirect successors of the Anabaptists, the “extreme left” in the sixteenth century religious struggle. The Methodists began as a schism from the Church of England and, as we have seen, were the first Christians to preach total abstinence instead of temperance in drink. As a substitute for drink, and for the other forms of social pleasure condemned by their discipline, they find an outlet in their orgiastic worship. Hence the epithet “shoutin’.” Of all Christian sects, these two are among those furthest from tradition. The proportion of college-bred or otherwise cultivated men and women in either denomination is small. Even their ministers are usually uneducated. On the other hand, these preachers are industrious, zealous, and devoted, so that they wield great influence. Naturally, with such ministers, the mental effort required for ethical definition is not to be found and taboo luxuriates. “Drink” to these people means whisky in rowdy dives. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Southern States under their new masters began to go Prohibition. Southerners, anxious to avoid the reproach of intolerance, will sometimes say that the desire to keep liquor from the negroes was the chief motive for Prohibition. Liquor, they will say, inflamed the negro’s passions and predisposed him to attempt rape upon white women. On the other hand, the presence of negroes had nothing to do with the situation described in the last paragraph, and such an authority as William Garrott Brown, himself a Southerner, has recorded his opinion that the race question had little to do with Southern Prohibition. The same author tells us that the pseudo-scientific propaganda against drink was scarcely heard of during the Southern Prohibition campaigns. According to him they were conducted, and won, “... mainly by the devices of a methodist revival ...; by terrifying and rather coarse emotional oratory from pulpit and platform, interspersed with singing and praying; by parades of women and children, drilled for the purpose; by a sort of persecution, not stopping short of an actual boycott, of prominent citizens inclined to vote wet; ... and finally, by fairly mobbing the polls with women and children, singing, praying and doing everything conceivable to embarrass and frighten every voter who appeared without a white ribbon in his lapel.”