Prohibitionism

“ There is some fun in passing a saloon, in going voluntarily on the water-wagon, in refusing that extra cocktail; there is none whatever in having someone else do it for you.
Our prayers may be dictated to us next. But something tells us that if prohibitionists formulate them, they have no more chance than ours of being heard in heaven. A world made safe for us by reformers is the last kind of world we care to dwell in. For reformers are the kind of people who paint heaven as a stupid city of golden streets and pearly gates, and incessant singing and playing of harps. ”

“ Then came a reaction, and even the stoutest opponents of the liquor traffic were forced to admit that in towns of any size prohibition has never yet been a success. As a leading reformer put it: “Prohibition has not yet touched the question where it presents the gravest difficulties, except to fail. After an existence of more than fifty years it has yet to grapple with this problem in any great centre of population. A law unenforced in its essential particulars debauches the public conscience.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the strange things about Prohibition was the fact that, with its coming, everyone imagined that everyone else would turn miser concerning treating. But here again the human element was forgotten. Everyone seems more anxious than ever to prove that his bootlegger has an exhaustless supply; and a certain pride is taken in handing out innumerable drinks. An aristocracy has arisen that even serves liqueurs after coffee—as though a plethora of crême de menthe and yellow and green chartreuse were in the land. The proverbial generosity of the American was never more in evidence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Laws that create artificial crimes are the hardest to carry into effect. You can never convince a majority of people that it is as bad to import goods without paying the legal duty as to commit larceny. Neither can you convince a majority of people that it is a crime or sin, or even a mistake, to drink a glass of wine or beer. Thousands and thousands of people in this State honestly believe that prohibition is an interference with their natural rights, and they feel justified in resorting to almost any means to defeat the law. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A few years ago I took dinner with a gentleman who had been elected Governor of one of our States on the Prohibition ticket. We had four kinds of wine during the meal, and a pony of brandy at the end. Prohibition will never be a success until it prohibits the Prohibitionists. And yet I most sincerely hope and believe that the time will come when drunkenness shall have perished from the earth. Let us cultivate the love of home. Let husbands and wives and children be companions. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We must also admit that if the example of a person who has violated a prohibition leads another to the same action, the disobedience of the prohibition has been transmitted like a contagion, just as the taboo is transferred from a person to an object, and from this to another.
If the violation of a taboo can be condoned through expiation or penance, which means, of course, a renunciation of a possession or a liberty, we have the proof that the observance of a taboo regulation was itself a renunciation of something really wished for. ”

“ Is this the country which can only flourish in the sickly, artificial atmosphere of prohibition? Is this the country to stand shivering on the brink of exposure to the healthful breezes of competition? ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. ”

“ These prohibition orators have the impudence to denounce me as "the peon of the rum power" while I am fighting the battles of personal liberty at my own cost, yet not a dad-burned one of 'em will open his head unless paid for his wind-power! They are "reformers" for revenue only.
I have noticed that, as a rule, men who speak against Prohibition have never been in the gutter, while those who pick up a precarious livelihood by chasing the "Rum Demon" around a stump have usually been his very humble slaves. ”

“ I have known only one rich man to refuse rooms at a fine hotel, simply because he felt it wrong to pay seventeen dollars a day, no matter what his bank balance. It is people like that who help the rest of us to a return to normal conditions. He thinks of someone but himself.
Yet we talk of Prohibition as though we were manfully trying to save the next generation from the perils of drink! ”

“ 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. ”

“ But when all drinking, temperate and intemperate, is alike put under the ban, the temptation to secret indulgence in drugs gets a foothold; and that temptation once yielded to, the downward path is swiftly trodden. Finally, there is a broad view of the whole subject of the relation of Prohibition to life, which these last reflections may serve to suggest. When a given evil in human life presents itself to our consideration, it is a natural and a praiseworthy impulse to seek to effect its removal. ”

“ A very short visit over here has convinced me that Prohibition, as at present administered, is both "ludicrous and cruel." The well-to-do can get the drinks they want. Young men and women, as well as adults, share with their friends and admirers all the pleasures that go with defying the law. I have no doubt from what I have been told that the power of the Saloon League lobby had to be smashed, and that the men who accomplished it deserve the highest praise, but can anyone truly say the Prohibition law is kept? ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our opponents allege, again, that “prohibition does not prohibit;” that the saloons are simply transformed into drug stores, and keep on selling liquor as before; and that drinking and drunkenness have really increased since the prohibition law went into effect. If these assertions are true, what have they to 177complain of? If prohibition does not prohibit, why do the men who want to open saloons, and make a living by making their fellow-men drunk, oppose prohibition? If a saloon can be so easily transformed into a drug store, why don’t all the saloon-keepers adopt that course? ”

“ Somehow we like the little battles with our souls. They add a piquancy to life. They give a spice and zest to the level days. Our appetites are our own affairs. The moderate drinker is not a drunkard; and to place restrictions upon him, in order to cure the ne’er-do-well is as unjust as it would be to put the petit larceny prisoner in the death chair along with the murderer.
Gertrude Atherton, who is wise and broad-minded, once wrote an article against Prohibition, which began with these sharp, incisive sentences:
“I am a woman. I never drink. But I am against Prohibition.” ”

“ The Prohibition Reform party of the United States, organized in the name of the people to revive, enforce, and perpetuate in the Government the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, submit in this centennial year of the Republic, for the suffrages of all [Pg 259] good citizens, the following platform of national reforms and measures:
1. The legal prohibition in the District of Columbia, the Territories, and in every other place subject to the laws of Congress, of the importation, exportation, manufacture, and traffic of all alcoholic beverages as high crimes against society ”

“ But any man who justifies Prohibition on the ground that drinking is an evil, no matter how temperate, is either a man of narrow and stupid mind or is utterly blind to the value of human liberty. The ardent old-time Prohibitionist--the man who thinks, however mistakenly, that the abolition of intoxicating drinks means the salvation of mankind--counts the impairment of liberty as a small matter in comparison with his world-saving reform ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”