PROHIBITION AND PERSONAL LIBERTY.
By Editor
THE following paragraph clipped from a country paper states a fallacy which has obtained to a considerable extent of late. We give it that we may the better expose it:— “It is the principle of personal liberty that the prohibitionists of all kinds, whether they seek to prohibit drinks, or meats, or dress, or religion, come in conflict with. The greatest thinkers and writers, the foremost divines, and the greatest statesmen have all pointed out as the fatal error of prohibition that it does not respect the inherent right of every freeman to decide for himself what he shall eat, drink, wear, and use, as well as how he shall worship.” The most serious objection to this paragraph is that it does not state the case fairly. Prohibition does not propose to interfere with personal liberty in the least. It does not propose to say what men shall eat, and drink, or what they shall not eat or drink. It only proposes to say that they shall not, for the sake of gain, systematically tempt their fellow-men to drink that which robs them not only of their money, but of their manhood, their health, and their reason. Nobody pretends to say that the State has not a just right to prohibit “opium joints,” and it has for the same reason an equal right to prohibit saloons. The “liberty” infringed by prohibition of the liquor traffic is not the liberty of the individual to eat, drink, and wear what he pleases, but the “right” of the saloon-keeper to fill his coffers at the expense of the wives and children of men, many of whom have not the moral stamina to resist the cravings of the unnatural appetite for alcoholic drinks.