Is Prohibition of the Liquor Business Right in Principle?
By N. J. Bowers
To PROHIBIT is not to allow, not to permit. Any business should be allowed and permitted to run that is necessary, useful, and conducive to human happiness. Can this be said of the whisky traffic? No man with a particle of common sense or regard for truth can say so. It is just the opposite, and at the very extreme of opposite, at that. The great majority of suffering, pauperism, and crime of every shade and grade, can curse alcohol for its existence. They have been conceived, born, and sent forth into the world by it. That which occasions a large share of the want, beggary, woe, and sin in this world ought to be stopped, prohibited, and killed so dead and buried so deep that no resurrection could ever raise it up. Do we count a man a criminal who would throw arsenic or strychnine into the family well? or who would put poison into our food? Has not the murderer intemperance ten thousand victims where the well poisoner and the food poisoner have one? Do we count the man a villain who plants alienation in the heart of husband or wife? Alcohol has done so in ten thousand cases. Does not the vender of alcoholic drinks over and over and over again transgress with impunity that law which says, "Thou shalt not kill"? Yet he goes on, and is "allowed" to do so. He should be prohibited. Why should the man who kills with the pistol, or the knife, or with strychnine, or henbane, or Prussic acid, be hanged, while the one who kills with the contents of a glass over a counter, amid music and fine pictures, goes free, and is called "respectable"? Why not equalize matters more? Why is not one murderer, and poisoner, and alienator of families, as culpable as another, especially when he does the most of the work? Why not check his career by the law? Yes, why not? Why not have laws against whisky vending as well as against counterfeiting, gambling, garroting, burglary, and highway robbery? It is extremely hard to see why that which feeds the stream of intemperance should not be the subject of legal prohibition and punishment as well as the flood of crime which this stream empties on society. We think it plain that prohibition is not wrong in principle, but that it is eminently right and just.