Important Temperance Convention by S. B. H.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 28, 1911

Important Temperance Convention

By S. B. H.

The fourteenth national convention of the Anti-Saloon League of America was held in Washington, December 11-14. Excellent addresses were delivered by Hon. John G. Woolley, Congressman Richmond P. Hobson, of Alabama, Senator Geo. F. Cotterill, of Washington, Judge A. Z. Blair, of Portsmouth, Ohio, and others. The spirit of the convention seemed to hold as fundamentally important the points that (a) it is first necessary to obtain a vision, so to speak, of the conditions resulting from the manufacture and sale of alcohol, to be followed by (b) a stirring program of education, and (c) the commitment of the boys of our country in particular, by pledge, to abstinence from intoxicating liquor.

It was held that the universal abolition of the liquor traffic rests upon two principles; namely, moral suasion and legal suasion. Did space permit, it would be interesting to give extracts from all the speeches made upon this important subject. Two are deserving of special mention. Referring to the fact that the nation's life itself is at stake in the liquor habit, Congressman Hobson said:—

“The menace of this destroyer extends yet farther, to the very life of the nation itself. In the rural life of the country, the people do not have the poison continually in their path. Thus it is that the great empires and enduring civilizations of history were all built upon rural life. A time comes, however, in the life of each nation when its citizens, having accumulated wealth, gather into cities to enjoy it. There the great destroyer does his deadly work. . . .”

“It is not a day too soon to grapple with this foe. We have reached the beginning of the second stage of American life. When degeneracy has gone much farther it will be too late. At the present rate it will not be long before abnormals and degenerates will swamp our cities and overrun our States. Nature will not tolerate a race of degenerates. A backward and usually a despised race, but undegenerate, is found ready to give the coup de grâce. When Persia degenerated, Greece was on hand to strike. When Greece degenerated, Rome was ready. When Rome degenerated, Gaul was ready.

“If America degenerates, the yellow man will be on hand. Some may make light of the yellow man; so did Romans make light of the ‘barbarians.’ The yellow man is not degenerating. He can shoot as straight as a white man now; and undegenerated, he can live on one tenth of what is necessary for the white man while he is in the field doing the shooting. A race of degenerates can not occupy the American continent. In this generation our people must take their choice; in the next generation it may be too late. There is no alternative. We are fairly in the death grapple. All the pages of history are crying out to America, ‘Conquer the great destroyer, or perish.’ The first law of nature, self-preservation, which holds for a nation or for a man, demands of the nation the death-warrant of the saloon.

“Suppose America should go down before the destroyer, whither would a rural and frugal fragment of America go to start a new empire? History leaves no hope to go back eastward. There is no longer any westward. We have reached the shores of the last ocean. In America the star of empire moving westward finishes the circle of the world.

“In America we are making the last stand of the great white race, and substantially of the human race. If this destroyer can not be conquered in young America, it can not in any of the old and more degenerate nations. If America fails, the world will be undone and the human race will be doomed to go down from degeneracy into degeneracy till the Almighty in wrath wipes out the accursed thing.”

Mr. Woolley, in a masterly address, said, among other things:—

“And first. What is a sumptuary law?—It is, or was, a law directed at the buyer, attempting to regulate his conduct, in matters of mere indifference, without any good end in view. For instance, in the reign of Edward IV a statute was enacted prohibiting anybody ‘under the degree of a lord,’ from buying shoes having points over two inches long at the toes. The idea was to discourage habits of luxury among the common people, but it was manifestly unjust and foolish.

“A prohibitory liquor law is directed at the business of selling poison as a beverage and of maintaining a rendezvous for temptation, dissipation, and disorder. It says to no man: ‘Thou shalt not buy nor drink,’ though it may, and may well, come to that. It is in the nature of a quarantine regulation, which never says: ‘Thou shalt not catch yellow fever,’ but, ‘Thou shalt not spread yellow fever.’ Incidentally a law that restrains a man from selling liquor to his neighbor diminishes the neighbor’s liberty to spend his own money and experiment with his own body, but that does not make it a sumptuary law.

“Prohibition rebukes personal selfishness. But how does it violate personal liberty? Personal liberty, according to Judge Cooley, our greatest writer on constitutional questions, is simply that condition in which rights are established and protected by means of such limitations and restraints upon the action of individual members of the political society as are needed to prevent what would be injurious to other individuals, or prejudicial to the general welfare; that is to say, ‘Obedience to law is liberty,’ and the liquor dealer is incorrigibly a traitor in the camp of law.

“Absolute liberty exists only where the person possessing it is powerless to injure others. A shipwrecked man, alone on a raft in mid-ocean, has it, but would give the whole world to swap it for the limitations; that is to say, the enlargements of civil liberty—the only kind of liberty that anybody but a fool or a villain counts worth having. In short, absolute liberty is only the obverse side of vital bankruptcy.

“The liquor business is injurious to everybody, including the owner, and prejudicial to every public interest. Nobody denies that. Prohibition is not tyranny, but protection for all men, women, children, and domestic animals.

“Does prohibition hurt business?—Yes, all the business that tends to ruin—brothels, gambling-dens, the white-slave trade, vagrancy, begging, pawning, divorcing; but it helps every business that makes for ‘more abundant life.’”

S. B. H.