The Outlook for Prohibition
By George W. Rine
Of all the forms of sin, probably none is working greater havoc upon human health, morals, and happiness than is the drink octopus. In the United States alone, 100,000 souls annually sink into drunkards' graves. Incredible as it seems, the people of this "land of the free" waste every year over $1,600,000,000 for alcoholic beverages. The yearly drink-bill of London has grown to the unthinkable magnitude of $125,000,000, three-fourths of which come out of the lean pockets of the "working-people." Every day in the year the people of Chicago let slip over the saloon bars of that city $400,000 of their cash. Of the 67,000 annual arrests for crime in New York City, Judge Davis charges up nine-tenths of them to the demon of strong drink. The Lord Chief Justice of England recently averred: "Make England sober, and you close nine-tenths of her prisons." The well-known missionary, Rev. C. S. Morrison, alleges that alcohol slays 200,000 savages every year. Not less than seventy-five per cent of the crime and fifty per cent of the insanity in Christendom are directly traceable to the drink traffic. Working for Statutory Prohibition.
Being by far the most prolific breeder of destitution, disease, crime, and misery, the liquor traffic has long been marked for destruction by the true friends of humanity. To this end various devices have been tried, but, as a rule, with indifferent success. To-day, as has been the case for many years, a large majority of the friends of temperance look to statutory prohibition as the ultimate and only adequate solution of the vexed question. They cherish the conviction that prohibition does prohibit. Ever since 1851 prohibitionists have sedulously endeavored to accomplish their purpose thru the medium of politics. In that year the first State organization was effected in the State of Maine. The movement spread rapidly until a like party was in full flower in nearly every State of the union. In 1872, the several State parties amalgamated themselves into a national party, and in the same year placed in the field their first candidate for the office of President of the United States. The number of votes that their successive candidates commanded gradually increased until 1892, when their nominee, General John Bidwell of California, received 260,000 votes. Ever since then the political strength of the Prohibition Party has been waning. Various States Enact Prohibition Laws.
Under the leadership of the famous General Neal Dow, the people of Maine, in 1851, adopted a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the State. Either statutory or constitutional prohibition was subsequently enacted by the States of New Hampshire, Vermont, Kansas, Iowa, and North Dakota. The voters of a dozen more States have registered their judgment regarding the same measure, but each time with decisively adverse results. After having lived under prohibition laws for a half century, both New Hampshire and Vermont swept those laws from their statute books in the spring of 1903, and in their stead adopted the policy of high license with the alternative of local option. Several years earlier Iowa likewise repudiated State prohibition, and went back to the principle of local option. The only States still under prohibition laws are Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota. The Logic of the Prohibitionist.
Starting with the indisputable proposition that the drink habit is harmful to the individual, to society, and to the State, the prohibitionist rightfully assumes that the business is essentially bad. The liquor-seller takes advantage of the weaknesses and pernicious appetites of men to their injury and ultimate ruin. Such a business must, in the very nature of things, be subversive not only of individual well-being, but of all social and political institutions. Governments are instituted, among other reasons, for the purpose of protecting the weak, defenseless, and helpless from the predatory, strong, powerful, and greedy. Hence no government can be indifferent to the liquor traffic without stultifying itself. The success of the saloon means the destruction of citizenship, at least in part. As to thieves, the question is not, Can the government put a stop to all stealing? As to murderers, the question is not, Can the civil magistrates absolutely prevent murder? As to counterfeiters, it is not, Can the government prevent counterfeiting so completely as to make our circulating medium absolutely safe? The question is, Shall the government forbid those things, and to the fullest extent of its power punish the violators of its laws, or shall it make some bargain or compromise with them? Our laws against stealing stand without any attempt to regulate the thief or to license him. Yet stealing goes on, and even increases amazingly. The liquor evil can never be killed by any kind of compromise. No one would think of denying that the drink traffic is inimical to good government;7yet, by the license system, the government assumes the obligation to protect the liquor-seller in his wicked business which tends directly to contravene the very ends for which governments exist. Hence the prohibitionist maintains that the government should in self-defense exterminate the distillery, the brewery, and the saloon by placing them under the absolute ban of the law. Prohibition Does Not Wholly Prohibit.
For nearly half a century the Maine prohibitory law has been little more than a name in Portland and other large cities of the State. In Portland one sheriff after another has allowed a large number of saloons to remain open and sell liquor in defiance of the law. At intervals the keepers of these saloons were summoned before the magistrate and fined, but these fines almost always found their way into the pockets of the sheriff and of his political henchmen. About six years ago, however, a clergyman succeeded to the office of sheriff, and made relentless efforts to enforce the State prohibition law. Raids, fines, and imprisonments were of constant occurrence. The traffic was, for the time being, apparently suppressed; to outward view the saloons were closed. But what really happened? A careful investigation conducted by a committee of expert officials disclosed the startling fact that during the regime of the parson-sheriff, intoxicating drink could be procured in more than 400 places spread over seventy-two of the city's streets. Three years ago the secretary of the Portland Y. M. C. A. told Mr. Whittaker, a noted Englishman, that he had never seen a glass of spirits in the city of Portland; yet at that very time he could have bought whisky over thirty bars in that city in daylight. After many years of constitutional prohibition, the police force of the city of Bangor made in one year 1,044 arrests for drunkenness. New Hampshire had statutory prohibition for fifty years. During the greater part of that time the saloon business was carried on openly in such cities as Manchester, Nashua, Dover, and Portsmouth. The system of "periodical fines" regulated the traffic in these places. These fines, as is also the case in many of the cities of Kansas, were virtually equivalent to high license. In New Hampshire "roadside houses of the vilest character were planted in the country districts without any regulation whatever." But former Governor Goodell petitioned for and received from Judge Peaslee, Jan. 1, 1902, a mandatory order that the saloons be closed. This mandamus proved to be the downfall of the State prohibitory law. For several weeks the saloons were actually out of business, but, under the pretext of selling "soft drinks" and "no percentage" beer, they gradually resumed a thriving trade. The demand for the repeal of the prohibition law rose to irresistible proportions. A local-option Legislature was elected. The law was repealed by a vote of 218 to 84, and New Hampshire passed out of the prohibitory column. Kansas has been under constitutional prohibition since 1881. In several of her largest cities the prohibitory law has seldom, if ever, been enforced. To-day there are thirty towns in which illegal saloons, or "joints," as they are called, are operated openly. In these towns a system of monthly fines, which is tantamount, in effect, to a license system, is in vogue, so that Kansas now practically has local option. Municipal campaigns are frequently waged between the "wet" and the "dry" elements. This is especially true in mayoralty campaigns. This lamentable status of things breeds contempt for law. In some Kansas towns it is impossible to convict a law-breaker of selling liquor, no matter how strong the proof of his guilt may be. This contempt for the prohibition law fosters contempt for other laws. Hence in these same towns the laws against gambling are systematically ignored. In some towns the illegal saloons are allowed to run wide open in second stories, but are not tolerated on first floors. In Salina, a town of 7,000, from twelve to sixteen of these second-story "joints" have operated for years. They each pay fifty dollars a month into the city treasury as fines. The experience in Kansas teaches that even with constitutional prohibition the battle for the suppression of the drink traffic is only partly won. In short, absolute prohibition is not possible where it lacks the well-nigh universal support of public opinion and sentiment. Again and again since 1864, the friends of prohibition in Canada have tirelessly worked to secure the enactment of prohibitory laws in the several provinces, with only partial and often temporary success. The number of saloons in the Dominion has been cut down about sixty per cent, but not suppressed. Obviously, then, the prospect for the ultimate triumph of the prohibition movement is dismaying, unpromising. Thousands of our recognized intellectual and professional moral leaders are among the avowed enemies of prohibition. Of this influential class, Dr. Lyman Abbott is typical. He recently declared editorially: "As a national policy prohibition has no visible chance of success." Prohibition Is Worth While.
Yet, notwithstanding all its defects and shortcomings, prohibition is a righteous and salutary policy, and therefore deserves the unqualified support of every friend of human well-being. By no means, as we have seen, does it circumvent all the dire evils of the saloon curse, but it minimizes them amazingly. Even the enemies of statutory prohibition admit that it has many distinct advantages where it is in force. - To a very large extent it prevents the drink habit from being formed by young men who are decently brought up. No one doubts that in the prohibition States of Kansas, Maine, and North Dakota, multiplied thousands of young men have been saved from the physical and moral ruin inseparable from the demon of rum. In those States it is no longer respectable to drink in public. There the business man, the clerk, the artisan, is not confronted with the fatal facility of procuring liquor, which is so awful a curse elsewhere; nor is the ordinary citizen, in the course of a walk down the street, able to "warm himself" or "cool himself," according to the special pretext for alcohol furnished by the weather. Further, the incitement to drink provoked by the pernicious free-lunch system of American saloons is, of course, non-existent in prohibition territory.
It must not be forgotten that in Maine and other prohibition States, the liquor interests are relentlessly clamoring for a resubmission of the whole question to the electorate. What does this fact mean if not that more liquor would be sold if high license and local option could be substituted for prohibition? Why should men sink money in a campaign for resubmission if they do not expect to gain more than it costs? There are counties in Kansas in which the jails have had no occupant for ten years, and in which the poorhouses have long since become the "spider's banquet halls." All the Kansas towns in which the saloons are permitted to operate under a system of fines, are deeply in debt, while the actual prohibition towns are free from debt, and their tax-rate is lower than in the saloon towns. No one in Kansas who uses intoxicants to a considerable degree can hope to be elected to any public office. It has been stated on excellent authority that practically all the rural young people of Kansas look upon liquor-selling as a crime in the same sense as are theft and robbery. The fact that prohibitory laws are often violated is by no means a convincing argument against them. Were this the case, there would be a great deal to say against the expediency of every law, from the Decalogue to speed regulations. The One All-Sufficient Remedy.
Prohibition, then, does mitigate, but can not eradicate the plague of strong drink. The power of this curse is vastly greater than that of man. But the power of God in Christ infinitely transcends that of any form of sin. The power of God, the Gospel, is set for the ultimate destruction of all wrong. Both inspired revelation and the facts of human experience compel us to conclude that the crime and sin of intemperance, like all other evils, will not be absolutely exterminated until the timeless reign of the Christ shall embrace a renovated earth in possession of a race of regenerated men. For then "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." But, thanks be to God, His limitless power is always available for the destruction of the drink habit in any individual life. Every soul enthralled by the demon of alcohol may by faith fling himself at the feet of the great Deliverer and cry out, "Lord, if Thou wilt Thou canst set me free!" And just as certain as he believes with all his heart that the Lord Jesus died upon the cross in order that He might in justice "set at liberty them that are bruised," the fetters will break, and the Saviour will keep him from falling and preserve him in the liberty of Christ forevermore.