IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1808, 29 November 1919, Page 4

IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA

A GREAT BRITISH EDITOR'S OPINIONS. U.S.A. UNDER THE BONE-DRY MEASURE. Probably no figure is better known in British Journalism than H. W. Massingham, the great editor who writes in the "Nation" under the title "H.W.M." This weekly journal has been publishing a series ot articles recording the impressions of the editor gathered on his recent tour through U.S.A. Portions of the article arc as follow: THE TRIUMPH OF PROHIBITION. Let no one doubt the long and serious preparation which led up to the constitutional amendment of December 18, 1917, and to its ratification by 45 States in the Union out of 48. Over 50 years of agitation lie behind a decision which has broken up the fading lines, of contention between Democrats and Republicans, and taken from both parties a majority of more than two to one in favour of Prohibition. The hostile forces in Congress were "worn down by having exhibited to them a moving picture of the march of Prohibition and of the great material benefits that had accompanied it. Not one of the public men I interrogated had a good word for the saloon. It was impressed on me that the bad odour in which it stood forbade the sensible compromise of retaining the lighter, beers. "We cannot trust it," was the answer. "The saloon must go. It corrupts our politics, enfeebles our stock, and stains our womanhood." THE ANTI-SALOON MOVEMENT. To a casual visitor the American saloon, with its male attendants, well-clothed and well-trained, has an air of almost dull sobriety in comparison with the riot of our pub-lic-house. But there is abundant witness to its ravage. The society of the small town, notably of the coastal population of New England, ■was pictured to me as seriously demoralised bv drink. The United States Census of 1910 put 10 per cent, of the insanity down to alcohol. Nearly all the railways began to discriminate against drinkers; great employers, such as Rockefeller and Ford, weeded them out of their shops and factories whenever they could be traced. The nation, in fact, was growing teetotal under a hundred influences. I prophesy that when the American soldier tells his full story of the prolonged liquor carnival of London they will be more potent still. Many American publicists distinguished between Temperance and Prohibition. But produce your proof of a slide to race degeneracy, and they will treat the drink question as the Anti-Saloon League treats it. The Bishop of Hereford sneers at the intellectual quality of the war on alcohol. I should have said that it had enlisted most of the-best minds in America. SUCCESS OF PROHIBITION.

The moment a town or a county or a State went dry the Anti-Saloon League began to feel its pulse and report its abounding social health. Bank deposits, the purchase of food, dry goods, children's needs, all bounded up. The hotels boomed I ■with the rest. Gaols began to emptv, and new schools to open. I Take' this report from Idaho. In j December, 1915, the saloon doors closed, and a drastic Prohibition law I came into effect. The use of all intoxicants, save pure alcohol for! medicinal or industrial purposes, was forbidden. Its mere possession ' ■was made unlawful and heavily punished. Reaction from such a law of Draco seemed inevitable. It sever came. Within 10 months of the edict the constitutional amendment for Prohibition was carried by a vote of three to one, and the trade, which had dictated the poltics and named the officials of the State, could not claim one of the thousand Office-seekers for Federal, State, county or local positions. Why? Chiefly because the wave of "good business" that followed the shift from "wet" to "dry." The change ■was most marked in Boise, the capital citv, where "the trade" was strongly entrenched. For the first time in its history manual workers and clerks began to exchange their pay checks for purchases in the stores. Debtors became creditors; cash transactions grew rapidly; the returns of businesses went up 10, 15, 30 per cent; and the deposits in the six banks increased by 13 per cent. Quite as remarkable was the way in which the crime-machinery eased off. Arrests for drunkenness fell from 135 in the first four months of 1915 to 23 in the first four months of 1916; arrests for vagrancy almost

ceased. One gaol was emptied for the first time in 36 years, another for the first time in its history, and the Justices of the Peace sat for months •with hardly a criminal case to try. A friend of the "wets" summed up their losing case as follows:—"The saloon is gone for ever, there can he no argument for its return; the only humiliating thing is that the fools and fanatics and cranks were right, and we were wrong."

Idaho and Boise arc not America, | but the incessant rolling hack of the | "wet" forces which has gone on' since the century opened could hardly have been accomplished unless their case had been fairly typical. Take Arkansas. In .one generation it has changed from license to nolicense, the licensed counties dwindling with each election from 16 to 12 and finally disappearing. Now, with trade booming, and the blazon of crime and poverty fading away, the Anti-Saloon League can report that "in no part of the State could a respectable minority vote be polled for the return of the saloon." Seattle and Detroit are examples of the greater hiving-rentrcs where Prohibition governs a mass of new wealth and energv and seems to stimulate it. The last Year Hook of the AntiSaloon League could report over ISO Governors of States as "on record" for the "dry" propaganda; and over 89 per cent, of the total area of government as under "no-license." AFTER THE BATTLE.

! Thus far moral enthusiasm, marching to one of the greatest triumphs in its history- Its advance is stained, say its enemies and many perfectly fair critics, witli intolerance, and is a blow at human nature. Obviously it is a check, a bit in the mouth of the average easy-going man. Starting with no conviction of the essential rationality of Prohition, I found myself attracted to its benevolence, as well as startled by the great surface of refined thinking and living which the movement had captured in its swift but by no means erratic course.

Its weakness is discernible

though the workman's View is by no means to be gauged by the protest of the Federation of Labour, one does not feel sure that Labour, as a whole, is really acquiescent. The workman is not a Puritan, and when be happens to be of European origin, he has the beer-drinking or the winedrinking habit, usually in moderation. If henceforth he must walk through life dreamless and openeyed, unsolaced by his favourite spell-binder, some new door of hope and imagination must open to him, or there will be a cry of injury and revolt.

The human animal, driven too fast, has shy corners to retreat to, queer solaces for the loss of forbidden appetites. A recent observer of Prohibition in Canada found evidence, which he retailed to me, of much resort to secret drinking and to vile and even murderous substitutes for beer and whisky. He and others thought Prohibition inapplicable to the greater American cities, and prophesied evasion. When the ollicials found the law was being dodged on a sufficiently wide scale, they would cease to try and enforce it. REACTION? But he and they frankly gave up the smaller towns and the farmers. They would stay Prohibitionist; for them the reign of alcohol was over. But that looks like a linal conquest. Prohibition has enlisted science, business, religion, and that typical American compound, business-reli-gion, the teacher, the doctor, the enthusiast. To their call answers a new veteran army of social workers which has fought and put its enemy to flight in all but three American States. Whatever happens to a wavering East, the concord of the West and the South (the latter based on the determination to keep whisky and the negro apart) makes a return to liquor almost impossible. A three-fourths majority of States is needed for undoing the Constitutional amendment. Where is it to be found? Nor can I conceive a serious moral reaction arriving unless the spiritual stuff of America undergoes a change which would resemble a deterioration. America is not a leisured people to anything like the extent that we are. Incomparably the greatest of the "business" nations, she makes also a continuous preparation for being greater still. She is "all in" for the race; we arc not. She may change; waver; soften; broaden; deepen. But she will not coarsen. Pier people will reach after the personal refinement which is their pride, and her new builders will continually take on new gradations of shape and colour from their Puritan model. H. W. M.