THE FRUITS OF PROHIBITION

And not only in our public life are we liberal, but also as regards our freedom from suspicion of one another in the pursuits of every day: for we do not feel resentment against our neighbour if he does as he likes.-Pericles, praising Athens, glancing at Sparta; Thucydides II, хххѵії.

IF it

Fit be true that a prohibition campaign is impending in England, Englishmen may be interested in the results of five "dry years in America. Have they been really "dry," and are the results of what enforcement there has been noticeably beneficial? That the law is not effectively enforced is admitted by some of the most intelligent and responsible advocates of prohibition themselves. The authors of a report published by the Research Department of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ, the most serious and (from the prohibitionists' pens) the fairest investigation of the subject that has yet appeared, take it that things are coming to a crisis, and find two things lacking: genuine enforcement and a body of public opinion which demands it. Everything, that is to say, is lacking but the law. Mr. J. J. Britt, Chief Counsel for the Prohibition Unit of the Treasury Department, considers enforcement to be at the rate of seventy per cent. ; other prohibitionists say sixty per cent. Most of those who insist upon the success of the measure, at the same time either scold the public for hindering it or implore the public to advance it. And as for the benefits of the enforcement, statistics which we shall presently consider indicate that, while in the first or second year of the new régime there was apparently a very considerable falling off in drunkenness, there has since been an alarming increase. Nor, as we shall see, are these the only evils.

Give it up, then, the foreigner will say ; but that, as we are tired of explaining to him, is easier said than done. It is written as an amendment into the Constitution and no amendment has ever been repealed; it has become as the laws of the Medes and Persians; it is now our eleventh commandment, though-more than all the others disobeyed. With an unconscious humour (they have no other) prohibitionists praise the law as the most interesting and important social experiment of the age. The

experiment is permanent: to see how it felt, we have laid our hands on a live wire.

But how came this to be law, public opinion being so lukewarm or hostile? A majority of two-thirds in both Houses of Congress, a majority of three-fourths of the legislatures of the forty-some States-votes in either case representative of the people-how is it that the law cannot be adequately enforced, not only because of laxity among the officials, but because of laxity in the public? This seems a contradiction in terms.

It is the old story of a large organized and determined minority having at last its way. As usual, the great public-in our country, inclined to temperance (if not, indeed, to total abstinence, though not to abstinence enforced) was inert or inattentive, concerned with many issues or not concerned at all; and the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, with well-paid officials who made this business their life-work, were ever at the candidates' elbows. If these declared against prohibition the fiery cross would go round, and not without reason for it. The "dry" candidate, in all likelihood, would be the only respectable one; the "wet" would be open to corruption or jobbery; for the class of people whence are chosen most of our legislators the type that voted to ban the teaching of evolution from the borders of Tennessee-do not stand on debatable ground. They are hot or cold, are righteous or unrighteous, or at least are expected to be; and the virtues of temperance and the principles of moderation and compromise are alien to their blood. Not that they all practise these so strictly, but that those who hold with the Laodiceans are rather justly-suspect. A drinking man is a bad man, but worse than the drinker is he who favours drink. He lacks principle, is a public menace. And, once elected, the candidates must, if they would be elected again, vote accordingly, under the Anti-Saloon League eye. The cleverer, farther-sighted ones, who may have had misgivings as to the outcome of these involuntary votes, could but cravenly console themselves, like the Governor of Tennessee who signed the Evolution Bill, with the thought that the measure would not be much enforced.

With us this thought is but too frequently the cause, as the thing itself is the result, of freakish and headlong legislation. Because it probably will not be enforced we vote for an imprudent

law thoughtlessly or unwillingly, or for a puritanical law impatiently and desperately, and the laws are less enforced than ever. It is a vicious circle. And if our chief legislators are not for the most part chosen from the best elements of our population, still less are the minor legislators and the petty executive officers. In the colonial days and the early days of independence they were; but with the spoils system, corruption, and the influx of foreigners eager for places, they have lost prestige and reputation which they have never recovered. An Englishman (until of late, at least, in these days of Socialism) was proud to be mayor, alderman, or justice of the peace, as few native cultivated Americans ever are. The police, above all, though in this generation much reformed, are still in some cities particularly corrupt and incapable, and in most cities quite without any special preparation or training. Recently the chief of police in a large city was, until appointed, a bed-spring maker. He may become a fine officer in time, but by then he may have turned to another trade. And to make amends for the weakness of the government in these, its all-important lower strata, the statute-books are filled. More laws are made because the laws in existence are unenforced, sometimes with the hope that these too, will not be enforced, sometimes with the hope that they will be with a vengeance. So a large part of the population (perhaps a majority of it) under long" temperance" training certainly a majority of the legislators under "temperance" surveillance-got it into their heads (or had it put into their heads with a thump) that the saloon and even liquor itself were the cause of the increase in crime; and to legislation we take readily.

The present measure, if adopted at all, should have been enacted as a statute. Here appears a curious trait of our popular psychology. The framers of the constitution provided in it the elaborate and difficult procedure for amendment as a means to remedy defects and oversights in the primary assignment of the powers and functions of government: the people have since made use of this procedure to enlarge the fixed and unchangeable law. Democrats themselves and-so recently-rebels besides, the framers of the constitution were fearful of both the rebelliousness and the tyranny of a democracy, and erected bulwarks and safeguards against either, with check and counter-check in one House as against another, in the executive against them both, and

in the Supreme Court above all; and democracy, in turn, has been so fearful of itself that it tyrannically thrust its measures and correctives into the constitution. Our fathers had meant this to be only a charter; we are turning it into a statute-book. So we did with slavery, with the franchise for the negroes, and with the annulling of the war debts of the Confederacy; so we did with drink; and so we have done since with woman suffrage. We make more laws because they are not enforced; and, because the laws are not enforced or are repealed, we in desperation turn them into constitutional amendments. We burn our bridges behind us for fear that we shall have need of them. Radicalism itself is fearful of change.

That is our character-we are a nation of idealists and reformers. Few of us now have much Puritan blood in our veins, but most of us have the Puritan spirit in our blood. When a moral issue arises, or an issue that has taken on a moral colour, there is no compromise, no half-way measure; but, with a convulsion, drink must go like slavery, and the prohibition be graven on tables of stone. Temperance, moderation, justice, we at such junctures know not. The slaves were not paid for as they were in the British West Indies, but set free at a stroke; whisky, wine or beer, breweries, distilleries or public-houses were not paid for, but tied up in bond or abolished. To pay would have been to condone the wrong. And all this is done with a fervour, in something of the spirit of a revival or crusade. It was a moral and religious passion that did away with slavery, a moral and religious passion that did away with drink. At the end of the war, at the dawn of a " new world," " fit for heroes to live in "(we, too, know the exuberant phrases) this came about, though the heroes on returning to it found themselves not altogether at home. It was new and uncomfortable, but what of that? No joy is like that of a revival, no consolation in this world like that of the nonconformist, all-conforming conscience. When the amendment was consummated a thrill went through the unco guid. Fathers wrote to sons, sons to fathers, and wives (other men's, at their sons' and husbands' expense) rendered thanks to heaven, as if the millennium were at hand. America is a great country, her future is immense and incalculable, but many Americans are on occasion incapable of an unmoral thought.

Not all of them, to be sure; as a whole no nation can be bent

on reform and stand. As in other countries the great body of the people is rather neutral and silent, and takes on the colour of the party that holds the reins. We ordinarily say and think that England became Puritan under Cromwell, but we know that under him England was acquiescing in the ways of an imperious and repressive, armed and highly organized, minority; and that readily she turned from them at the Restoration. Whether in a referendum our people would have voted for prohibition we have now no means of determining; but it is incredible that with their attention focussed upon the question, and with time for discussion and an opportunity for enlightenment, they should, by a twothirds majority, have voted for it as irrevocable. Only fanatics cut off their own members, tie their own hands. Some of our people, employers and manufacturers mostly, inclined to prohibition for economic rather than moral reasons, and in the interest of industrial efficiency and safety; others, a far larger number, inclined to it simply with the total abstainer's natural intolerance of those who have the taste; but both the one sort and the other would have seen, or been shown, that the constitution was intended to be a guarantee and bulwark against the tyranny of a majority, not to be a means for fastening the tyranny of a minority for ever upon them. Englishmen themselves know how representative bodies fail to represent; seldom in an election is the issue clear, single, and unequivocal; but still less in America, where elections are held only at stated times and not immediately after the issue has arisen.

With the institution of the referendum in some of the States, we have recently acquired a means of measuring the discrepancy. In Massachusetts, a State pointed to with complacence by the Anti-Saloon League as that happy one in which under prohibition seven gaols stand empty, the legislature recently passed an enforcement code in order to secure the benefits of the amendment as yet none too apparent-by a majority of 134 to 68 in the Lower House, and of 28 to 9 in the Upper. A referendum was demanded and taken, and the law overthrown by a vote of 427,840 to 323,964.

It was in the leaders first, and in the people by contagion afterwards, that this spirit of reform which brought prohibition about asserted itself; not indeed in our chief political leaders of either party, such as Lodge, Root, or Wilson, who opposed it;