Alcohol prohibition

“ The Volstead act declares that the phrase "intoxicating liquor," as used in the act, "shall be construed to include 'all liquors' containing one-half of one percentum or more of alcohol by volume which are fit for use for beverage purposes."
Since everybody knows that a drink containing one-half of one per cent. of alcohol is not in fact an intoxicating drink, a vast amount of indignation has been aroused, among opponents of National Prohibition, by this stretching of the letter of the Amendment. ”

“ At the present moment the British people are not in the least persuaded that the evils of alcohol for a minority of the population cannot be dealt with effectively without resorting to the very drastic expedient of forbidding its consumption by the majority who use it in moderation. Are they likely to be convinced? That depends on the failure or success of all other expedients to exterminate the evil of alcoholism.
That brings me to another explanation. America reached prohibition by the path of experiment. ”

“ I am bound to say, however, that I think every patriotic Australian should vote, if not for prohibition, at least for the solution which is most dear to myself, and that is the lowering of the legal standard of alcohol in any drink. We have been shocked and astonished by the number of young men of decent exterior whom we have seen staggering down the street, often quite early in the day. The Biblical test for drunkenness, that it was not yet the third hour, would not apply to them. ”

“ This department which began in weakness, and was for years regarded as fanatical even by many members of the W. C. T. U. has entered upon an era of victories. The National Pure Food Law requires the percentage of alcohol in patent medicines, and the presence of different dangerous drugs, to be stated upon the label. The prohibition law of Georgia forbids physicians to prescribe alcoholic beverages, absolute alcohol only being permitted. Kansas has amended her law so that whisky drug-stores are eliminated. If physicians prescribe alcohol the law forbids charge for it. ”

“ So long as the liquor traffic is so extensively and profitably carried on in Europe and America, and so long as the consumption of alcohol is so enormous, so long will there be a difference of opinion as to its ill effects, but in this matter, by means of its State Prohibition Laws, America is setting an example to the world. ”

“ If there was never another ounce of alcohol manufactured, the world would be none the loser either medicinally or commercially. My reason for making this statement is that prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages has been largely defeated because there have not been the proper safeguards thrown about the manufacture and sale of drug-store concoctions that can be had in any quantity as substitutes for alcoholic stimulants ”

“ If alcohol is a bad thing, then prohibition is a good thing. But if temperance is a good thing, then prohibition is a bad thing. You cannot be temperate in the use of alcohol if you have none. Nor is sobriety a virtue in you if you lock up the wine-cellar and throw the keys down the well. ”

“ It is only as yet possible to surmise as to the forces which led to the great refusal. The nation, with the almost unanimous voice of its wisest and best citizens, had called for the deliverance of the people from alcohol by its total prohibition. Employers of labour, who {127} had no sympathy originally for the prohibition movement, were converted to it by the spectacle of the nation's marshalling of its forces being steadily hampered by drunkenness. ”

“ The prohibition movement originated in farming communities and villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously insignificant. No self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager could afford to be known as a drinking man. ”

“ The time may not be yet come for a total prohibition of alcohol throughout the country. {115} Those who know anything of the intolerable conditions under which men and women live in the crowded, noisome tenements of our great cities, realise that these people must have some way of escape from their miserable environment. Total prohibition is the ideal to be kept steadily in view, but before that ideal can be realised the people must be prepared for it. The only way to prepare for the ideal is by a reconstruction of the social order. ”

“ It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore, their souls, by Pemberton’s creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton’s tonics and blood-builders and women’s specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating. ”

“ The people who thought before the law was adopted that it was wicked or inexpedient to drink intoxicants, still think so. The people who thought otherwise continue to think otherwise. Many people drink less than before the law began to operate, but a good many other people drink more, and buy much worse beverages at much higher prices. To some extent Prohibition seems to have made drinking popular by diminishing the individual discouragement of it and putting the responsibility for the maintenance of temperance on a law and the officers who enforce it. ”

“ A law punishing drunkenness, which is a public nuisance, comes under the head I have been speaking of; a law forbidding a man to drink for fear that he may become a drunkard does not. And in fact the prohibitionists themselves instinctively recognize the difference, and avoid, so far as they can, offending the sense of liberty by so direct an attack upon it. ”

“ It happens that the receiving of stolen goods or the passing of forged checks is a crime under the law, as well as the stealing or the forgery itself; and that the Prohibition law does not make the drinking or even the buying of liquor, but only the making or selling of it, a crime; but what a miserable refuge this is for a man who professes to believe that the abolition of intoxicating liquor is so supreme a public necessity as to demand the remaking of the Constitution of the United States for the purpose! ”

“ A great many persons think the present laws have no influence in restraining drunkenness, and that as much liquor is consumed now as formerly. As a proof of their efficacy, we will give here a portion of a table, taken from the report of the Excise Commissioners for last year, comparing the number of arrests for offences actually resulting from the excessive indulgence in intoxicating drinks on Sundays, when the rum-sellers were obliged to keep their glittering shops closed the entire day, and Tuesdays, when the prohibition applied only to before sunrise. ”

“ He speaks bitterly of the proposal to permit "light wines and beer," and asks whether any one would propose to permit light burglary or light arson. That man evidently regards indulgence in any intoxicating liquor as a crime, and he looks upon the law as a prohibition of that crime. And he is essentially right, if the law is right. For while the law does not in its express terms make drinking a crime, its intention--and its practical effect so far as regards the great mass of the people--is precisely that. ”

“ But so far from this being a case of desperate necessity, nothing is more unanimously acknowledged by all except those who labor under an obsession, than that the evil of drink has been steadily diminishing. Not only during the period of Prohibition agitation, but for many decades before that, drunkenness had been rapidly declining, and both temperate drinking and total abstinence correspondingly increasing. It is unnecessary to appeal to statistics. The familiar experience of every man whose memory runs back twenty, or forty, or sixty years, is sufficient to put the case beyond question ”

“ In prohibition many look for the means by which the curse of drunkenness is to be abated. But, while we wait for a public sentiment strong enough to determine legislation, sixty thousand unhappy beings are yearly consigned to drunkards' graves.
What have temperance men accomplished in the fifty years during which they have so earnestly opposed the drinking usages of society and the traffic in alcoholic drinks? And what have they done for the prevention and cure of drunkenness? ”

“ In view of these principles, the court said it was difficult to perceive any ground for the judiciary to declare that the prohibition by a state of the manufacture or sale, within her limits, of intoxicating liquors for general use there as a beverage, is not fairly adapted to the end of protecting the community against the evils which confessedly result from the excessive use of ardent spirits. ”

“ But it was not found necessary to consider the question in the Jacob Ruppert Case, because there was no appropriation of property but merely a lessening of value due to permissible restriction imposed upon its use.
The ultimate legislative object of prohibition is to prevent the drinking of intoxicating liquor by any one because of the demoralizing effect of drunkenness upon society. ”

“ The blacklisting of habitual drinkers by their union, and the growing tendency on the part of large corporations, factories, and business houses to take a decided stand against drinking, are having a marked effect in reducing drunkenness where it does most harm. This practice has been declared by John Bach McMasters, the noted American historian, to have exerted a stronger influence in promoting temperance and total abstinence than all the temperance crusades from Hartley's time to the prohibition wave of [362] 1907. ”

“ Thus, the abolition of alcoholic beverages, at present the fad of a minority not always very respectable in the methods of its propaganda, will presently be an indispensable feature of social progress.
Unless all criminologists are wrong in their deductions, something like fifty per cent. of all crime will be got rid of when alcohol no longer exists to cause crime. There are further ameliorative influences certain to be at work which will tend to reduce the sorts of crime chiefly troublesome at present. ”

“ How to lessen, if not to extinguish these evils, is a problem worthy the thought of all who have the good of their kind at heart. In 1851 Maine adopted a law which forbade the selling of intoxicating liquors as a beverage, and prohibition laws have been passed since then in other States. How far these laws have been effective it is not for us to attempt to say. There are those who contend that prohibition is the surest preventive of drunkenness, while others maintain that it wholly fails of its purpose. ”

“ A representative group of men and women, compelled by what they regarded as immediate necessity, organized a prohibition educational campaign for the purpose of bringing to the British people testimony as to the actual results accomplished by the prohibition of the beverage liquor in Russia, Canada, and the United States. ”

“ Even we who are not professional reformers recognize that. But the right kind of mild drinking—the drinking of wines, which helps digestion by giving the proper spur to the gastric juices—is a salutary habit, and does no one any harm. In France I have never seen anyone intoxicated—except a visiting American; and I fear, with Prohibition, that more than ever will the cafés and streets of Paris be littered with shameful and shameless fellow countrymen of mine. The French learn from childhood how to drink ”

“ How far the protection of the public order, health, and morals demands the restriction or prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors is a question peculiarly appertaining to the legislatures of the several states, and to be determined by them upon their own views of public policy, taking into consideration the needs, the education, the habits, and the usages of people of various races and origin, and living in regions far apart and widely differing in climate and in physical characteristics. ”

“ Since prohibition went into effect I have been through places and across regions that I knew twenty years ago, during years before the idea of prohibition was anything but a joke and drys "queer birds." Let me say offhand that a traveler could not then cross the United States or go anywhere in the country and not find himself constantly beset by liquor and constantly witness its effects on men and women. ”

“ The sale of liquor is made illegal in the hope of preventing drinking altogether or of diminishing it by making it more difficult. General prohibition has been tried in some American states, and is still in force in a few; it is also applied to native races, under civilized rule, both in Africa and North America. Local prohibition is widely in force in the United States, Canada and Australasia, Sweden and Norway. ”

“ I have no desire to be pointed out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and State statutes against drinking. ”

“ For drunkenness is rampant in the land, as it never has been. Prohibition does everything but prohibit. The very thing it sets out to do it fails to do. That is as self-evident as the misery in crowded tenement districts in great cities. There is no denying it. People who never drank before, drink now—in enormous numbers. ”