Prohibition

“ In the light of present day happenings and with the echoes of rage, despair and lamentation filling our ears, it would be hard to imagine the incredulity with which many worthy, and otherwise, patriots of a former generation would have regarded the possibilities of the present prohibition era. ”

“ The genius, the nature, the spirit of our state governments amount to a prohibition of such acts of legislation, and the general principles of law and reason forbid them. Per Chase, J. Ibid.
15. The words and intent of the prohibition embrace, 1st, every law that makes an action done before the framing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal, and punishes such action; 2d, every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was when committed; 3d, every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment than the law annexed to the crime when committed ”

“ America treats prohibition as one of its greatest moral triumphs. Britain treats it as a joke.
What accounts for this remarkable disparity in the attitude of the two great English-speaking communities towards one of the most baffling and elusive problems civilisation has to deal with? It cannot be a fundamental difference in temperament or in moral outlook. The men who engineered prohibition in America are of our own race and kind, bred in the Puritan traditions that came originally from our shores. ”

“ Many laws which interfere with the habits, customs and beliefs of a large number of people, like the prohibition laws, never receive the assent of so large a percentage as to make people conscious of any wrong in violating them, and therefore people break them when they can. ”

“ I have lived to see seventeen states under prohibition, fifty millions of people of the United States living under prohibitory laws, the Congress of the United States giving a majority vote for submitting national prohibition to the people, and the great empire of Russia going dry in a day. ”

“ To strike with crusading frenzy at what you have worked yourself up into believing is wholly an accursed thing is a tempting short cut, but is fraught with the possibility of all manner of harm. In the case of Prohibition, I have endeavored to point out several of the forms of harm which it carries with it. ”

“ The Professional Prohibs. Did you ever know of one of these gentry making a Prohibition speech except for filthy lucre—unless he was electioneering for office or taking subscribers for a cold-water journal? They are the cattle who are OUT FOR THE STUFF; they are the mercenaries—the men who pump foul air through their faces for a fee. Did you ever hear of a man getting paid for defending the doctrine of personal liberty? Did you ever see a collection taken up at an anti-prohibition meeting to pay some important spouter for pointing out to the people their political duty? ”

“ Whatever prohibition there is, is a means to the same purpose, made necessary, it may be supposed, by the persistence of evil and its insidious forms and the experience of the inadequacy of penalties or other repressive measures. ”

“ Shall we degrade them still further by carrying them into the market and fixing a price upon their violation? Extend the principle of an equivalent, from cases of prohibition merely, to instances of moral turpitude,—to felony and homicide,—and every gentleman will see its enormity. ”

“ One prohibition is, "that no person shall be deprived of his property, immunities, or privileges, put out of the protection of the law, or deprived of his life, liberty, or estate, but by judgment of his peers or the law of the land." ”

“ People therefore feel in their hearts that they are confronted practically with no other choice but that of either supinely submitting to the full rigor of Prohibition, of trying to procure a law which nullifies the Constitution, or of expressing their resentment against an outrage on the first principles of the Constitution by contemptuous disregard of the law. ”

“ In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dullness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is a law that the rich make knowing they can always break it. ”

“ In law, as defined by Blackstone, prohibition is “ a writ directed to the judge and parties of a suit in any inferior court, commanding them to cease from the prosecution thereof, upon a surmise either that the cause originally or some collateral matter arising therein does, not belong to that jurisdiction, but to the cognizance of some other court.” A writ of prohibition is a prerogative writ—that is to say, it does not issue as of course, but is granted only on proper grounds being shown. ”

“ DAY after day, month after month, a distressing, a disgusting spectacle is presented to the American people in connection with the enforcement of the national Prohibition law. No day passes without newspaper headlines which "feature" some phase of the contest going on between the Government on the one hand and millions of citizens on the other; citizens who belong not to the criminal or semi-criminal classes, nor yet to the ranks of those who are indifferent or disloyal to the principles of our institutions, but who are typical Americans, decent, industrious, patriotic, law-abiding. ”

“ I venture that many a vote for prohibition comes from gentlemen who look longingly through swinging doors — and pass on in propitiation of Satan and their alert consorts, the lake of brimstone and the corrective broomstick. ”

“ Furthermore, prohibition, besides being opposed both to the laws of Jesus and the laws of nature, has the essential weakness, as a remedy for intemperance, that it attacks the means or rather one of the means, of intemperance, and not the cause—the causa efficiens, as the logicians would say. The Anglo-Saxons have for centuries been meat-eaters and liquor-drinkers. ”

“ The constitutional prohibition was intended to protect every man's rights against that kind of legislation which seeks either to inflict a penalty without a trial or to inflict a new penalty for an old matter. ”

“ But don’t the dissenters in this country take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are dissenters, aren’t they? If so, then I should think you would call prohibition itself a religious movement. ”

“ If the customary prohibition had grown obsolete, the punishment might well be assigned to a being of another, a spiritual, race, in which old human ideas lingered, as the neolithic dread of iron lingers in the Welsh fairies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although prohibition as a principle has been accepted by many, yet in its practical application in the home in serious illness, it is still feared by the immense majority of even our strongest prohibitionists. ”

“ The most disinterested and intelligent observers, accustomed to judging public conditions and social facts, differed widely in their verdicts on prohibition, its economic results and general benefits or disadvantages to the public welfare in the first year of national prohibition. ”

“ We do most strictly repeat our prohibition, unto all our subjects of the pretended reformed religion, that neither they, nor their wives, nor children, do depart our kingdom, countries, or lands of our dominion, nor transport their goods and effects, on pain, for men so offending, of their being sent to the gallies, and of confiscation of bodies and goods, for the women. ”

“ If the words which describe the subject-matter of the prohibition are general, including a whole class, . . . we think the charge in the libel ought to conform to the true sense and meaning of the words as used by the legislature. ”

“ We have heard it again and again declared, that the English government still adheres, with immovable firmness, to its old doctrines of prohibition; that although journalists, theorists, and scientific writers advance other doctrines, yet the practical men, the legislators, the government of the country, are too wise to follow them. ”

“ It is needless to state that many modern statutes—like prohibition laws, for instance—are passed for that very reason. Yet whatever the fact may have been in the past, there is no doubt that for the future, legislation by the people, constructive law-making at the popular behest, is the great new fact of Anglo-American civilization. ”

“ Those who advocate strict prohibition as a means of checking intemperance among our people, seem firmly impressed with the idea that every possible safeguard should be thrown around the youth and those of mature age who have not, within themselves, the power to resist temptations that are fast sapping the foundations upon which have rested the prosperity, morality, and purity of great Christian nations, that are now wallowing in the filth and degradation of intemperance. ”

“ It has been realized by a few deep thinkers that no prohibitions have to be made against what nobody ever thinks of doing, and that the existence of a prohibitive law is proof of a widespread tendency to do the thing prohibited. All prohibition is, from the point of view of both conscious and unconscious psychology, unscientific. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Besides, any prohibition would increase the desire of removing, and would infallibly prevent strangers from settling in the country. What must we think of a government which has no means, but fear, to keep its subjects in their own country ”

“ He will have all the resources of the State treasury behind him. He shall have for the first time PROHIBITION. Prohibition enforced, prohibition as the statutes have ordered it, prohibition in actuality instead of its pretence. The pretence has satisfied the rumsellers who sold, the rum-drinkers who drank, and the radicals who have boasted of the law, for all have got out of it what results were desired: appetite was catered to, vanity was satisfied, and graft engendered for the benefit of the office-holding class. ”

“ The gravest reproach which attaches to that unfortunate act, the one which causes deepest concern among thinking citizens, does not relate to any incidental feature of the Prohibition manoevres. The fundamental trouble lay in a deplorable absence of any general understanding of the seriousness of making a vital change in the Constitution--incomparably the most vital to which it has ever been subjected--and of the solemn responsibility of those upon whom rested the decision to make or not to make that change. ”

“ For instance, the critic whom I am here venturing to criticize says that people differ about Prohibition according to their knowledge or ignorance of the dreadful state of the slums, the ravages of alcoholism in our industrial cities, and all the rest of it. ”

“ It is therefore entirely forbidden to any man to infringe these our precepts and decrees, mandates, statutes, will, approval, prohibition, sublation, abolition, exhortation and request, or to dare to bear witness or proceed against them. ”

“ Before dismissing this subject it will be well to consider one favorite argument of those who contend that Prohibition is no more obnoxious to the charge of being a violation of personal liberty than are certain other laws which are accepted as matters of course. A law prohibiting narcotic drugs, they say, imposes a restraint upon personal liberty of the same sort as does a law prohibiting alcoholic liquors. ”

“ WELL MEANING exhorters, shocked at the spectacle of millions of perfectly decent and law-abiding Americans showing an utter disregard of the Prohibition law, are prone to insist that to violate this law, or to abet its violation, is just as immoral as to violate any other criminal law. ”

“ The prohibition policy has bitter enemies among some who are not personally interested in the business. They think it is too drastic and call attention to the sociological principle that prohibitions are a primitive method of social control, but the trend of public opinion is strongly against them on the ground that prohibitions are necessary in an imperfect human society. Government increases its regulation of business of all kinds, and the police their regulation of individuals. ”

“ Total prohibition may produce suffering, and may manifest a spirit of unfriendliness towards sister States; but prohibition, except upon conditions derogatory to the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United States, is mischievous, and productive of hostility and disloyalty to the general government. ”

“ The truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. ”