Part 2

If the writer were to answer these questions, she would be constrained to say that the last count is the strongest count: the people do not realize what they are doing =by joining forces with those who are conspiring against their highest interests=. 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 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; his acts and opinions have been nothing more than weak reflections of the opinions and acts of the muddled mass. 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. He has become a real automaton.

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.

A Dangerous Combination

Prohibitionists, once they are seated upon the throne of civil power, do not intend to stop at the passage of laws prohibiting the liquor traffic. As has already been stated, they are fully as interested in securing compulsory Sabbath observance laws, and in fact, as stated at the [1]Inter-Church Conference in New York City in 1905, "to secure a larger combined influence for the churches of Christ in =all matters= affecting the =moral= and =social= conditions of the people, so as to promote the application of the law of Christ =in every relation of human life=." This, indeed, means a wide range of activities, and the individual citizen may well enquire, and with apprehension, as to just how far this =combined influence= is to go in its invasion of "=every relation of human life=." If it actually means what it says, and proposes to invade "every relation of human life" with a string of laws and regulations as complex and as multitudinous as the relations of human lives, the student of political government, if not the citizen, may ask of this gigantic combination of the so-called moral forces of the country: =what will be the ultimatum? Where will it all end? What is to become of the unit of citizenship?=

"Straws show which way the wind is blowing," is an old saying. In this connection, the following article--a portion of an editorial--that appeared in the =Sacramento (Cal.) Bee=, Oct. 7, 1915, is both interesting and significant:

As a further example of the intolerant, domineering and narrow-minded tendencies of the prohibitionists, witness this communication recently published by the New York Evening Sun, signed "Herman Trent, of the Anti-Saloon League," and dated at Englewood, New Jersey:

"Speaking now in my personal capacity, and not as a member of the Anti-Saloon League, I will say I regard the anti-liquor crusade =as merely the beginning of a much larger movement=--a movement that will have as its watchword 'Efficiency in Government.'

"If I had my way I would not only close up the saloons and the race-tracks. I would close all tobacco shops, confectionery stores, delicatessen shops and other places where gastronomic deviltries are purveyed--all low theatres and bathing beaches.

"I would forbid the selling of gambling devices such as playing cards, dice, checkers and chess sets; I would forbid the holding of socialistic, anarchistic and atheistic meetings; I would abolish the sale of tea and coffee, and I would forbid the making or sale of pastry, pie, cake and such like trash."

This at least is consistent. And Mr. Trent is startlingly frank in thus boldly publishing his programme. In a lecture work extending to all parts of this country and for a quarter of a century of time, I have found a great many Herman Trents, and I fear they are increasing, and I know they are becoming emboldened. After all, are we so far removed from the blue-law regime of early New England? Be certain of one thing: =today, we would see just such a regime except for a due regard for the Constitution and a minimum majority of votes=.

As to compulsory Sabbath observance by civil law, we have the recommendation of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, held in Chicago recently. The resolutions of this national church body were as follows:

"That the general assembly reiterates its strong and emphatic disapproval of all secular uses of the Sabbath day, all games and sports, in civic life, and also in the army and navy, all unnecessary traveling and all excursions.

"That we most respectfully call attention of all public officials to the potent influence of their position on all moral questions, and the necessity of greater care on their part, proportioned to the exalted nature of their offices which they occupy, that they may strengthen rather than weaken by their influence public and private observance of the Lord's day.

"That the general assembly reiterates its emphatic condemnation of the Sunday newspaper, and urges the members of the Presbyterian church to refuse to subscribe for it or read it or advertise in it."

Here is a demand for blue laws, pure and simple. 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.

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=.

To doubt this, would be to refute the absolute facts that appear. 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."

Therefore, we conclude that the principle underlying and giving rise to Prohibition, should it obtain everywhere, would crush out every vestige of =individual liberty=, and its adherents would justify their course by the "monstrous principle"; namely, that "it is the absolute social right of every individual that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought to act." Prohibitionists must necessarily stand for this "monstrous principle," and therefore, as certainly as two and two make four, =Prohibition is a menace to the American system of government=.

An Old-Time Fallacy

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.

On the question of poverty and drink, the opinion of Francis E. Willard ought to be accepted by the Prohibitionists first of all. She says:

"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.... 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."

An editorial in the =New York World= some time ago contained the following significant statement:

"Only two families in every hundred of the 1575 which have been in the care of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor this summer were brought to poverty =through intemperance=. The percentage goes against preconceived notions and is, indeed, surprisingly small. It should disturb that prosperous complacency which sees in poverty only or mainly the penalty for wanton misdeed. The Association's report for 1909 showed that intemperance, imprisonment, desertion, 'shiftlessness and inefficiency,' all told, accounted for not 12 per cent of those brought to want. The figures for that year showed that 65 per cent of the poverty was due to two causes--sickness and unemployment."

Carroll D. Wright, in the "Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commission of Labor," shows that only one-fourth of one per cent of all cases of non-employment in the United States is due to intemperance.

During the winter months of 1913-14, the number of unemployed men and women in the United States was appalling. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the large cities, were taxed to the utmost to care for the "jobless."

It was estimated that New York City had its quota of 400,000 idle, Chicago 200,000, San Francisco 30,000. Organized armies of the unemployed clamored for work and for bread, and in the country districts idle men were everywhere tramping to and fro in search of work. "THE UNEMPLOYED" was a standing headliner of the public press. Suicides from inability to find work were startlingly prevalent; and the whole country was perplexed as to how to adjust complex conditions so as to relieve untold suffering and misery.

Were the Prohibitionists on hand at that time with any sort of a program, solution or panacea for the difficulty? Not at all. All their efforts were reserved for election day; their energies stored up for the glad time when well-paid agitators travel the country in Pullman cars to tell the people of rural communities that "poverty is caused by drink."

Industrial Conditions Responsible

The fact of the matter is: that in the time when the situation of the unemployed is most aggravated--when it attracts nation-wide attention--singularly enough, no voice was raised, either by individuals, societies, labor organizations, or the press, publicly, attributing the abnormal and distressing conditions =to the drink habit=.

All these know better. They know, as the New York Association discovered by its investigation, that inability to find work, and sickness, has brought the great army of idle men and women to their plight. They know that our productive ability is increasing much more rapidly than our consumptive capacity, and that the statesmen-ship of this country as well as that of every other country in the world is grappling not with any merely individual or national, but with a world problem.

They know that in China, with its hundreds of millions of frugal, temperate, hard-toiling people; in Turkey, with its sober, industrious, Mahomet-worshiping masses; in India, with its almost countless thousands, governed by strict religious, moral and ethical codes,--the trouble is identical: =it is economic=. In the present industrial system of those lands, as well as our own, there is no longer work enough for all, not sufficient jobs for the number of toilers, and thus, necessarily and unfortunately, there must be the great bodies of the unemployed.

The trouble lies in the industrial and social system, and not in the individual primarily, whether he be Turk, Chinaman, Hindoo or Christian. All the statistics gathered from every available source will bear out the assertion that =the problem is economic=, and it is only unwise presumption that will even attempt to lay these distressing conditions and results to the drink habit.

But you may explode this popular fallacy of the prohibitionist into atoms, and he persistently gathers together the fragmentary portions of his fanciful theory, and comes back with the same old story and tells it in the same old way.

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.

He ought to realize that in the final analysis all evils are connected with life itself, for evil is not in things, but in men or women who abuse or misuse things. And he should recognize the patent truth that "you cannot legislate men by civil action into the performance of good and righteous deeds."

The Opinion of an Economist

Mr. J. B. Osborne, in "The Liquor Question--Political, Moral and Economic Phases," says:

"The abolition of poverty and better education for the masses, are the only remedies for the disease of alcoholism.

"Alcoholism, however, is not as prevalent as Mr. Chafin or the usual advocate of Prohibition would have you believe. United States reports for 1909 show the average number of deaths attributed to alcoholism to be only 2811; from scalds and burns, 6772; from drowning, 5387; from poison, 3390; from suicide, 5498; while killed and maimed on railroads we have a total of about 18,000.

"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. The State has power also to abolish the Church and transform its property into State property as was recently done in France under the direction of Premier Clemenceau.

"The action of the French government in this instance, however, did not reduce the amount of religion in France; on the contrary, it had the effect of making the lukewarm churchman more active and zealous in the church's cause.

"Under laws prohibiting the liquor business we find the same results. In the State of Maine, the oldest prohibition State in the Union, we find more arrests for drunkenness, in proportion to the population, than in any State where we have the licensed saloon.

"All Christian nations have for centuries accepted the prohibitory laws of the ten commandments such as 'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' and yet it is the same Christian nations that have the largest armies and navies, and that have been doing nearly all the killing for thousands of years; likewise, 'Thou shalt not steal,' while today the most respected citizens of every Christian nation in the world are, at the same time, the world's biggest robbers.

"The power of government is limited when it comes to controlling or regulating the thought of the individual, nor is it in the province of government to say when, where, or what, citizens should eat, drink or wear. The wisest government would promote conditions under which the people would have plenty to eat, plenty to drink, plenty to wear and good houses to live in. What he should eat and drink as well as the amount and kind, or the color of the clothes he should wear, should be the function of the individual."

Effects of Prohibition

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 laws do not actually prohibit, as every one knows; but they do bring about a state of affairs, upon whatever scale attempted, abhorrent to every right-thinking person. As to some of the results, Professor Hugo Munsterberg, of Harvard University, says:

"Judges know how rapidly the value of the oath sinks in courts where =violation of the prohibition laws= is a frequent charge, and how habitual perjury becomes tolerated by respectable people. The city politicians know still better how closely blackmail and corruption hang together, in the social psychology, with the enforcement of laws that strike against the belief and traditions of wider circles. The public service becomes degraded, the public conscience becomes dulled. And can there be any doubt that disregard of laws is the most dangerous psychological factor in our present-day American civilization."

And upon this question of the effectiveness of Prohibitory legislation, and the effects of such legislation on the moral life of the nation, the Committee of Fifty on the Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem in its exhaustive report published in 1905, said:

"There has been concurrent evil of prohibitory legislation. The efforts to enforce it during forty years have had some unlooked-for effects on public respect for courts, judicial proceedings, oaths and laws in general, and for officers of the law, legislators and public servants.... 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. Through an agitation which has always had a moral end, =these immoralities have been developed and made conspicuous=."

Representative Claude U. Stone, of Illinois, in the debate in Congress over the Hobson resolution for National Prohibition, said:

"There is State-wide prohibition in Maine, and the Webb-Kenyon law prevents the overriding of that law by other States, and yet there are cities in Maine that have more shops per capita for the public sale of liquor than my home city, which is the greatest distilling city in the world. In parts of Maine candidates for sheriff, who have the enforcing of the law, =cannot be elected to office if they do not give a public pledge that they will violate their oath of office and will not enforce the laws=. The same can be said of Georgia, another prohibition State. It is for this reason that the people should be permitted to determine by their own votes the character of restraint that should be placed upon themselves."

In the same debate in Congress, Representative Julius Kahn, of California, remarked:

"Mr. 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. 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; opens the way for illegal traffic, and fosters an immoral negligence of law and order! And in addition to all this, it lessens drunkenness not a whit; but on the contrary, increases intemperance, making it more possible and perhaps more inviting to those unable to curb the appetite.

What an indictment is this of prohibition; and being true, it would seem these well-established and undeniable facts concerning the results of Prohibition would serve to convince the citizen who is governed by reason and sound judgment rather than by sentiment and emotion, that Prohibition in its practical development is =a real menace to the American system of government=!

Collective Tyranny in Government

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. For in the principle of Prohibition lies the germ of collective tyranny from which may arise every species of intolerance and despotism--an intolerative principle as far removed from =the principle of American liberty= as heaven is from hell, and as different in every essential from the spirit of republican government--a true democracy--as the breath of the polar iceberg is different from the blaze of the equatorial sun!

Could the American public see Prohibition =as it is=, and not what it seems to be:--then this un-American and un-Christian movement would speedily be relegated to the shades of oblivion, and =real and effective reform along moral, social and intellectual lines would begin=. As it is, Prohibition actually stands, like a Chinese Wall, in the pathway of =real reform=.

Says Professor Munsterberg:

"The evils of drink exist, and to neglect their cure would be criminal; but to rush on to the conclusion that every vineyard ought, therefore, to be devastated is unworthy the logic of a self-governing nation."

The evils of gluttony also exist, and that more people die from direct and indirect causes arising from overeating than from drink will not be denied, yet who would propose a law to close the butcher shops, and prohibit the milling of fine flour and the importation of tea and coffee--higher medical and dietary authorities having decided all these latter to be injurious--in order to improve the physical condition of the people!