The Menace of Prohibition Part 2

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 a.s.sociation 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-s.h.i.+p 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-wors.h.i.+ping ma.s.ses; 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 a.s.sertion 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-cla.s.s, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ma.s.ses, 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 appet.i.te.

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 h.e.l.l, 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."