Anti-Prohibitionists Themselves Say the Traffic Must Reform or Go
Can the Leopard Change His Spots?
By MILTON CHARLES WILCOX
SARA MAHAN, LL. D., formerly president of two colleges and one university, forcibly voices a great principle in the following sentence:
“Admissions in favor of truth from the ranks of its enemies constitute the highest kind of evidence.”
The testimony of a presumably honest man as to his uprightness in a deal is worth something, but the testimony of his adversaries who admit his honesty is worth more.
WORSE THAN WAR, FAMINE, AND PESTILENCE
Temperance advocates are generally united in the conviction that the prohibition of the liquor traffic — nay, more, of the manufacture and sale of distilled, fermented, and malt liquors — is the only solution of the great problem of intemperance, the evils of which Gladstone declared to exceed those of war, famine, and pestilence combined.
Yet many good men who deplore the ruinous results of the liquor traffic believe that it may be modified and made tolerable if not beneficial. Such are opposed, on various grounds, to prohibition.
THE STRONGEST KIND OF EVIDENCE
Admissions from these opponents of prohibition regarding the potencies of evil in the liquor traffic “constitute the highest kind of evidence.”
In the light of this principle, read the following editorial from the Sacramento Daily Bee of January 8, 1914, presumably from the vigorous and facile pen of its able editor, Mr. Charles McClatchy. The Bee is opposed to prohibition, and so also is the editorial the Bee quotes from the National Liquor Dealers' Journal; but prohibitionists will enjoy reading this editorial, and the great undecided public ought to read it. It speaks great facts in its terrible arraignment. We present its evidence before the court of the people. In the light of it, ought the liquor traffic longer to exist? Which is preferable, that or prohibition?
The editorial follows, applicable to other states as well as to California:
“Some months ago the National Liquor Dealers' Journal contained a surprising editorial, recounting recent prohibition victories, and declaring:
LIQUOR MEN CAN NOT LEARN
“For this the liquor business is to blame. It seems incapable of learning any lesson of advancement or any motive but profit.
“To perpetuate itself it has formed alliances with the slums that repel all conscientious and patriotic citizens.
“It deliberately aids the most corrupt political powers, and backs with all of its resources the most unworthy men, the most corrupt and recreant officials.
It does not aid the purification of municipal, state, or national administration.
“Why? — Because it has to ask immunity for its own lawlessness.
“That this condition is inherently and inevitably necessary we do not believe; but it has come to be a fact, and the public which is to pass on the matter in its final analysis believes anything bad that anybody can tell it of the liquor business.
“Why? Let the leaders of the trade answer.
“There are billions of property involved, and an industry of great employing and tax-paying ability; but when the people decide that the truth is being told about the alcoholic liquor trade, the money value will not count, for conscience aroused puts the value of a man above all other things.
“The writer believes that prohibition is theoretically wrong, but he knows that theories, however well substantiated, may be overthrown by conditions, as has often been done in the world's history.'
“It were well for the brewer, wine, and liquor interests if they had more straight-from-the-shoulder counselors like the National Liquor Dealers' Journal.
“In California, the people will vote next November upon the question of total prohibition.
TAXING TO THE LIMIT FOR THE FIGHT
“The breweries, wineries, and liquor dealers of the state are gathering all their recruits and taxing all their resources to fight it.
“They sowed the wind of the dive and the dirty saloon, of contempt for law, of disregard for the home, and now they fear they will reap the whirlwind of disaster and bankruptcy.
HAVE CREATED THIS CRISIS
“The present crisis in California is of their own creation. They can blame its being and its strength on none other than themselves. They fashioned the Frankenstein which may pursue them to their undoing, and they fed it until it grew into the monster from which they run affrighted.
THE DIRTY DIVE THEIR PAMPERED CHILD
“The liquor traffic in California is what they have made it. The dirty dive is their pampered child. The low saloon is their costly offspring. The road-house that lures young boys to hell and inveigles young girls into prostitution is the creature of their greed; of their contempt for common decency; of their arrogant disregard for the welfare and the rights of fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters; of their impious and damnable immolation of boyhood and girlhood upon the altar of the pocketbook.
“These men are facing the raging tempest of their own creation.
“And how do they propose to meet it in its oncoming wrath?
“What weapons will they use to cope with the battalions of prohibition they have created, have fathered, have nourished into a swarming host, blind in its wrath and indiscriminate in its vengeance?242
“The evidence is apparent on every hand that they intend to follow old and played-out methods; that they will provide a great defense fund, with which to flood the state with literature and with orators; that their principal reliance will be on the erstwhile potent almighty dollar — a champion once erroneously credited with being able to accomplish anything.
“If that be their mainstay, their great hope, and prop, and defense, they may as well keep their money. For they can not save themselves that way.
RIGHT-ABOUT-FACE AND GET A DIVORCE
“The only thing for the wine, brewery, and liquor interests of California to do in this crisis is to right-about-face — and that immediately.
“They must at once divorce themselves from the low saloon and the dirty dive; from the assignation road-house; from arrogant and corrupt attempts at political domination — and they must give evidence that that divorce will be permanent.
“They can not stand before the bar of public opinion, and crack the lash any more over the voters.
“Their hope lies in humbly pleading for mercy at the feet of the people, confessing their guilt, and promising permanent reformation.
“They can not well go to the father, holding in his good right hand the potent weapon of the ballot, and say: 'You must vote against this prohibition amendment. Its passage would take from us all our property and leave us wrecked and ruined.'
YOUR GREED SENT HIM TO THE DEVIL
“And if they do, let them expect this answer: 'You ask me to protect your property; to save your dollars. Where is that which was dearer to me than all my property, all my dollars, than everything else I have on earth — almost than my own hopes of heaven — my son, my boy? Your greed for dirty dollars sent him to the devil. Restore me my boy as he was, and then I may talk to you — but not before.'
“And if they beseech the mother for her vote, they may expect her to reply: 'You men helped, and protected, and shielded, if you did not own, a gilded Satan's den that lured my girl into its net and drove her to ruin and to shame. You met every cry for vengeance against that devil's trap with a sneer or an evasion; and each effort to clean it out brought from you your powerful influence with the authorities to give the den a renewed lease of vicious life.
YOUR PROPERTY AND MY GIRL
“And now you beg me to vote for the protection of your property! You'll excuse me; but my vote will not go to save any property used to send young girls to hell. I will need it in November in an effort to save the best of all property — the girlhood of California.'
“The brewery, wine, and liquor interests can tax the distilleries, and the breweries, and the wineries until the gutters run money instead of water.
UNLESS THEY REFUSE TO DESTROY THE BOYS AND THE GIRLS
“And every dollar the people find these forces are spending out of a defense fund — even in the most legitimate way — will create votes for the prohibition amendment — unless these interests start in right now to take their protecting arms from the low saloon and the dirty dive; unless they refuse to sell to any lawbreaking saloon, or any den inveigling young boys to hell and young girls to prostitution.
“If the brewery, wine, and liquor interests of California expect the voters to go their way next November, they must approach them with clean hands — clean hands which they intend to keep clean.
THE 'BEE' AND PROHIBITION
“The Bee has no use for prohibition. It does not believe in it, either as a principle or as a policy. It considers it unjust in its essence.
“As a matter of equity, a democratic and inherent right, the majority have no more righteous authority to prevent the minority from drinking wine or beer — always provided it be done with sobriety, in moderation, and without disorder — than they would have to order the same minority not to smoke cigars or to eat pork.
PROHIBITION RATHER THAN YOUTHFUL CRIME AND LICENTIOUSNESS
“But if prohibition be unjust in its very kernel, it is less unjust than the rank injustice which has so strengthened it — the combination of wine and beer with boyish crime and girlish licentiousness.
“If these hellish evils are not to be remedied — if the dive, the deadfall, the low saloon, the wedding of liquor and lust, are not to be cast out of the traffic — if it is still to continue a menace to our boys and a lure to our girls, then the state of California had better embrace prohibition as the least offending and offensive of two evils, the milder injustice of two injustices.
“And if the beer, wine, and liquor interests should elect not to repent and reform, and still prohibition should not win this year — or if, promising to repent and reform, they should go back to their evil ways — that result would be the Dead Sea's fruit of a victory that would turn to ashes on the lips; for the battle would be renewed at the next general election, and prohibition then would sweep the state of California like a prairie fire.'
Let the redactor of this article say in conclusion:
1. Every one of discernment and experience knows that the liquor combination will never reform, can never reform.
CAN THE LEOPARD CHANGE HIS SPOTS?
The leopard can not change his spots. The cockle seed can not bring forth wheat. The road-house, the brothel, the dive, the saloon mill, the great mass of crime, the wrecked and blasted lives, the ruined homes, are all the legitimate offspring of that monster, the liquor traffic, the fruit of indulgence in intoxicants, whether drunk in a low saloon or in a gilded palace.
2. 'The battalions of prohibition' are neither mad nor blind. They are composed of men and women who believe that the millions worse than wasted, the millions used to debauch and degrade and destroy manhood and womanhood, are an instrument not only unprofitable to the state, but an investment, a partnership, which the state must utterly repudiate if she protects the rights of her citizens, including the wives and the progeny of the liquor dealers.
THE COST OF CRIME WORTH SAVING
The prohibitionists believe that the annual cost of crime due to the liquor traffic — more than twenty-nine million dollars in California alone — is worth saving for schools, highways, and homes in which children are safe and in which men and women can walk and live soberly.
The prohibitionists believe that character is worth more than coin; that fathers' and mothers' hearts and hopes, that sober sons and daughters, are not to be measured by the billions invested. The former are priceless to heart and home and state; the latter is an investment for the destruction of mankind by one of its greatest enemies.
The prohibitionists believe that the sons and daughters of America are worthy of a better end than to furnish grist for the devilish mills of the saloon, the brothel, the dive, the dishonored and disgraceful death which awaits.
Reader, let your vote for prohibition help to destroy the monstrous evil.
