On moral questions......................

     There has never been any question before the American public, whether political or economic, religious or military, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a moral question.  Even so dull a row as that over the currency produced its vast crop of saints and succubi, of martyrs and Pontius Pilates, of crimes, heathenries and crowns of thorns.  Nor has there ever been any surcease of that spiritual eagerness which lay at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession; the American has remained, from the very beginning, a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. 

-H. L. Mencken, from his July 19, 1916 column in the Baltimore Evening Sun