THE WARNING OF PROHIBITION.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 15970, 12 November 1919, Page 8

THE WARNING OF PROHIBITION.

(’Ey Stephen Leacock, Professor of Political Economy, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.) - (Continued.)

Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that there are throughout the United States and Canada great numbers of people who are strongly in favour of prohibition for everybody except themselves. The South went dry by the vote of the whites who proposed to keep drink away from the blacks, not for the sake of their souls, but in order to get more work out of them. The manufacturer voted his employees dry with the same expectation, proposing for himself to remain “wet.” The shop-keepers of the towns voted the farmers dry, so as to get more money in trade. The fanners who live in the conntry where it is dark and silent, helped to vote the cities into dryness as a spite against their lights and gaiety.

One might well ask who, then, are the real prohibitionists? Such there undoubtedly are. In the first place there are a certain number of deeply religious, patriotic and estimable people who actually believe that in passing a law to make it a crime for a man to sell a glass of beer they are doing the work of Christ on earth. Let them be entitled—along with Torqnemada and Philip, of Spain —to the credit of their good intentions. Along with these are a vast number of people who are animated by the evil spirit that for ages long has vexed the fortunes of humanity: the desire to tyrannise and compel—to force the souls of other men to compliance with the narrow rigour of their own. These, above -all, are the typical prohibitionists. But to their numbers must he added the large body of people who fish in the troubled waters for their own gain: the salaried enthusiasts, the paid informers, the politicians seeking for votes, ministers of the Gospel currying favour with the dominant section of their congregations, business men and proprietors of newspapers whose profit lies in the hands of the prohibitionists to make or mar. To all these must be added the whole cohort of drunkards who can he relied upon to poll a vote in favour of prohibition in a mood of sentimental remorse.

.. On the other side stand undoubtedly the great majority of the people. National prohibition, let it be observed, has not been adopted either in the United States or in Canada by a popular vote. It never would be. It has been carried only by the votes of the Legislatures, by tin* actions of the politicians responsive to the. demand of the minority. But the great mass of the people took no action. There has grown up indeed, among all those who ought to be the leaders of public opinion, a strange conspiracy of silence. Nobody seems willing to bear witness to how widely diffused is the habit of normal wholesome drinking, and of the great benefits to be derived from it. The university where I have worked for nearly twenty, years contains in its faculties a great number of scholarly, industrious men whose life-work cannot be derided or despised, even by the salaried agitato!* of a prohibitionist society. Yet the great majority of them “drink.” I use that awful word in the full gloomy sense given to it by the teetotaller. I mean that if you will ask these men to dinner and offer them a glass of wine they will take it. Some will take two. - I have seen them take and soda. During these same years I have been privileged.to know a great many of the leading lawyers of Montreal, whose brains and energy and service to the community I cannot too much admire. If there are any of them who do not “drink,” I can only say that I have not seen them. I can bear the same dreadful testimony on behalf of my friends who are doctors: and the same and*even more emphatic on behalf of all the painters, artists, and literary men with whom I have had the good fortune to be very closely associated. Of the clergy, I cannot speak. But in days more cheerful than the present gloomy times there were at least those of them who thought a glass of port no very dreadful sin.