Janet had often listened, at first unwillingly, later receptively, to Robert’s elaboration of the idea. His views had shaped themselves in some such way as this. The tradition in which Janet’s childhood was moulded was that baser, narrower, lower class American tradition which has always been at grips with the heroic patrician spirit of the Declaration of Independence. It was a tradition of negation, restriction, deprivation; of deprivation for yourself within reasonable limits, and of deprivation for your neighbor within no reasonable limits at all. It was a tradition that rallied opposition to Sunday newspapers, Sunday novels, Sunday theatres, and Sunday sports, besides minutely networking itself through a thousand insidious channels into all sorts of social behavior every day of the week. It was a tradition, not of the magnificent _no_ of self-control but of the demoralizing _no_ of compulsory rectitude. In short, it was the tradition from which the successive prohibition movements—beer, sex, manners, and what not—have drawn their ethical backing. Families like the Barrs were the moral backbone of a strong section of American public opinion. Their prejudices, jealousies and pruderies pitched the tone of national manners, fixed the standard of public taste, curbed the flight of the country’s artistic genius, and gave an American the same cultural standing as against a European that a citizen of Boonville held as against a full-fledged New Yorker. The same causes erected an Anthony Comstock into a national figure better known than the President’s cabinet, gave rise to episodes like that of Maxim Gorky, and made a raid on the women bathers at Atlantic City a topic of serious discussion throughout the country. In Robert’s view, the Barrs of America prided themselves on the cast-iron taboos they had laid on all decent and civilized manifestations of sex. They had eliminated every natural, healthy and spontaneous expression of the sex instinct from American books, music, pictures and daily intercourse. This was their first contribution to Western culture. Their second contribution—and they frankly gloried in it, too—was that they had morally sandbagged all dissenters and almost completely crushed the spirit of dissent.