Lulu Wightman

“ For this reason I have become an advocate of such a change in social conditions as shall stamp out the disease of poverty even as medical science is stamping out leprosy, smallpox, and cholera; and I believe the age in which we live will yet be characterized as one of those dark, dismal, and damning ages when some people were so dead to the love of their kind that they left them in poverty without a heartache or a blush. ”

“ Recollect, that the tendency toward imperial government and despotic rule is here today as it has been in every nation and in every age of the world. Menaces to the rights and privileges of the people are ever-present: the continued structure of safeguarding laws and constitutions presuppose the enemy to be ever near:—tyranny may slumber, but let bigotry and intolerance call ever so softly, and it springs into active life and being, and on every occasion, with consummate cunning, justifies its demands with a specious pretext—censorship for the good of the people. ”

“ Eugene W. Chafin, Prohibition candidate for president, in 1912, said:
“I don’t want any person who claims to be a party Prohibitionist—a middle-of-the-road Prohibitionist—ever to sign another petition, or ask Congress or any legislature anywhere under the American flag to pass any prohibitive laws on the liquor question. We don’t want any laws of any kind whatever passed. All we want is to be elected to power.... Elect us to power, and we will repeal a few laws and do the rest by interpretation of the constitution and administration of the government.” ”

“ What Is the Real Menace of Prohibition?
It is the false principle from which it derives its life and being. “We are the good people,” say the moral reformers: “you are the bad; therefore it is the duty of the good people to seek control of the government and to enact laws that will make you bad people good.” ”

“ But we cannot see how the innocent bystander profits, when the free citizen is forbidden to go fishing on Sunday, to smoke in public, to see certain plays, to get Anthony Comstock reports and the Kreutzer Sonata through the mails; to say in public just what he wants to say—to exercise freedom of speech; to kiss his girl in the parks, or a woman to wear abbreviated skirts,—ad libitum!
These prohibitions burden the individual without conferring any appreciable advantage upon the mass, or even upon other individuals. ”

“ Left to impractical theorizing, Prohibition is harmless: allowed to enter the realm of civil government as a practical working force, it becomes dangerous, threatening not only one liberty, but all the liberties of the people. ”

“ The effect of Prohibition, sumptuary law enacted in government, upon the political fabric of the government, should claim the serious attention of American citizens particularly. We can hardly recur to the consideration of this subject too often.
Prohibition is essentially a repressive measure, and all history shows that repressive measures, under ordinary conditions, not only fail, but worse than fail. In aiming to do away with one evil, Prohibitionists set up a vastly greater one. In our American political life the very worst political conditions may ensue. ”

“ Prohibition and Sunday laws are so closely allied, so thoroughly interwoven in the acts and lives of our modern reformers, that I may venture to say that should the Prohibitionists ever gain complete political power in this country we shall see rigid, intolerant Sunday laws in comparison to which those early blue laws of Connecticut would be a delicate shade. ”

“ The average American has become a chronic joiner. He does not stand for something: he must belong to something. The Prohibition movement comes along and appeals to his [Pg 17] sentimental and emotional nature. He has been schooled to depend largely on sentiment, and trained to march with the crowd. To act as a responsible unit has been practically impossible. He has never thought upon the question deeply; he has been part of a muddled mass of humanity, thinking as the mass thought and acting as they acted: he has not been the soul-free individual he imagined himself to be ”

“ A Prohibition nation would be, beyond every reasonable doubt, a religio-politico system of government in which every spark of the liberties of the people would be extinguished; and this because, as Mill says, “so monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty;—there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify.” ”

“ Perhaps he realizes that to allow its peaceful demise, means to leave Prohibition standing absolutely without a remedy for the problem of unemployment or the general industrial conditions of over-production. Then, having no practical remedy for intemperance, no remedy for the ills and troubles of the working-class, and no remedy for anything else, he should graciously step aside and make room for the real world-movements for improvement and progress along rational and practical lines of individual and national development. ”

“ Thousands of good, well-informed citizens of this country, high in public and social life, many of these leaders in religious sentiment and thought, are united in the belief that Prohibition begins at the wrong end of the matter, and they renounce it as not only weak, inefficient and impractical, but destructive to the American ideals. ”

“ They are as determined to secure compulsory Sabbath Day observance laws as they are to obtain Prohibition laws; and wherever and whenever you find a movement for one, you invariably find, sooner or later, a demand for the other. Prohibition and Sunday laws go hand in hand. In fact, they result from the same cause—the desire to control individuals; the application in civil law of the fallacious theory that it is “the social right of every individual that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought to act.” ”

“ The Prohibition movement then, unquestionably, is simply a means to an end,—the stepping-stone to political power,—the pathway to the goal of political ambition; and it seems only fair to presume that all the hue and cry over drunkenness and the inability of some men to control their natural appetites is, after all, only a minor matter ”

“ The remotest possibility of the success of such an unjust, un-American, illiberal and dangerous form of tyranny in government, should alarm the American people beyond and above every other question, even that of war; and should set them to the task of a close analysis of the subject and trend of Prohibition. ”

“ Speaker, prohibition is not temperance. Temperance makes for human progress. It should be invoked in regard to our food, our drink, our dress, and even our physical exercise. As many people die from overeating as die from excessive use of alcohol. Excessive physical exercise has frequently led to heart failure and death. Temperance not alone in the use of alcohol, but temperance in everything that affects the human race, is what should be taught in the homes and schools of this country. ”

“ A compulsory law for Sunday or Sabbath observance is equivalent to a law for compulsory baptism, or compulsory church service, or the support of the church: in like manner, sumptuary laws that determine what one may not drink, may extend to defining what one may eat, ad infinitum, until a thousand and one articles of food and drink are “unlawful”—articles of diet and consumption that to a large proportion of the citizens may seem harmless, if not, indeed, beneficial. ”

“ There he may register his disapprobation, and put a curb on the restless, uneasy, political charlatan who, under the guise of moral reform, would seize the machinery of political government and make it an engine of tyranny and oppression.
It must be kept in mind that the clerical politicians of the Prohibition party (no distinction can be made between the Prohibition Party and the Anti-Saloon League: they are one and the same in intent and purpose) are interested not merely in the enactment of prohibitory liquor laws. ”

“ The trouble is, if liberty-loving citizens of the United States, jealous of their rights and constitutional guaranties and determined to preserve them even to the point of quitting their beloved country, should go to some wild and desolate land, and set up a government where they could enjoy religious and personal freedom, it would not satisfy the Prohibition moral-reform forces. ”

“ That National Prohibition is an approaching enemy to free government, of which the people should be warned even at the risk of being grossly misunderstood, is my opinion. From the watch-towers of American liberty the warning should go forth. ”

“ If any American citizen will read the history of the blue laws of Connecticut, and how Cotton Mather whipped the people through the streets of early New England towns for failure to attend Sunday services in the meeting-houses, he will think seriously before lending a helping hand to the work of re-inaugurating a social and civil system like that. ”

“ He joins the Prohibition forces, and thereafter thinks less than before, because, being joined to something, he can safely trust to that something—the organized mass which, in turn, thinks and acts just as a few self-appointed and ambitious leaders think and act. There is no more for him to do now than to walk up to the polls and vote precisely as he is bidden to do. ”

“ The public has seen law defied, a whole generation of habitual law-breakers schooled in evasion and shamelessness, courts ineffective through fluctuations of policy, delays, perjuries, negligencies and other miscarriages of justice, officers of the law double-faced and mercenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypocritical and truckling, and office-holders unfaithful to pledges and public expectation. ”

“ Brown, the Anti-Saloon League is strongly intrenched at Washington. He says that it “maintains at Washington one of the most powerful lobbies ever seen at the National Capital,” and regarding its influence upon the nation’s law-makers he has this to say:
“Its representatives, backed by an organized influence of public opinion, are enabled to dictate the attitude of a considerable number of Congressmen on a pending question, with the result that Congressmen oftentimes are driven to vote against their own views and their own consciencies in favor of measures advocated by the lobby.” ”

“ For myself, twenty-three years of study and observation have convinced me that poverty is the prime cause of intemperance, and that misery is the mother and hereditary appetite the father of the drink hallucination.... ”

“ Temperance harms no one, on the contrary, it does good. Prohibition on the other hand, has generally resulted in making men liars, sneaks and hypocrites. If men want liquor, they can invariably get it, and they can get it even in prohibition States.”
The testimony is quite overwhelming: that Prohibition in government corrupts courts, encourages false oaths, intimidates legislators, causes public officials to be double-faced and mercenary; makes sneaks, liars and hypocrites out of men; increases bribery ”

“ The attempts to further and further restrict our liberties in a Puritan sense are carried on in the garb of a religious movement, and the ministers of all churches and the members of all congregations are constantly called upon for support and money to maintain lobbies in both the national and state capitals; and these lobbyists are cracking the whip over our lawmakers, and are urging them to pass more and more restrictive laws,—laws which in their mistaken zeal, they believe will make people good. ”

“ For many years the Prohibitionists have systematically promulgated the fallacy that the poverty of the working class is caused by drink. And this they continue to do in face of all the facts, amply proven by all available statistics, that flatly contradict the fallacy. ”

“ Certainly no one would advocate the prohibition of water because 5000 people annually get drowned; nor the abolition of the railroads because 18,000 are killed and maimed annually.
“Thousands of workingmen lose their lives every year in the coal and lead mines, but no efforts are made by the prohibitionists to secure proper ventilation and inspection of the mines or safety appliances for the railroads. That the State has power to prohibit or abolish the legalized sale of liquor no intelligent person will deny. ”

“ And he does not once realize that he has joined forces with those who are conspiring against his highest interests. He helps to pass a law that takes away his neighbor’s rights and privileges, and does not dream that in so doing he is taking away his own rights and constitutional guaranties, and as surely undermining the fabric of our free institutions and thereby hastening national decay and national ruin. ”

“ It is not difficult to see that the Sunday law and Prohibition are quite identical in character; the source of their origin must be the same: at least, it is plain that their introduction and operation in civil government is destructive of personal freedom and choice.
Sumptuary Laws Increasing
These restrictions by law are eternally increasing, so that it has become almost impossible for a citizen of [Pg 15] the republic to live a single day without violating one or more laws. In almost every relation of life the conduct of the American is minutely regulated. ”

“ History tells us of despots who kept their subjects in perpetual serfdom, and of rulers who robbed the people of their freedom; but there is no case on record, so far as we know, where the people of their own volition and by their own votes robbed themselves of their own birthright. ”