“T.P.” ON PROHIBITION IN AMERICA.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 286, 19 April 1919, Page 6

“T.P.” ON PROHIBITION IN AMERICA.

The “L>ail> Chronicle" for S< plt inbcr iOth last contains s< -me irost interesting references to Prohibition in an article by Mr T. IV O’Connor, M.P., under the title of “American lnlensity and Self-sacrifice.” \lluding to a recent

MAXQL’KT AT WASHINGTON, W here the President and other eminent men were present, Mr O’Connor sa\s: ‘‘The laughter did not sound as hearty to me as American laughter u>ually does, for I had come a long journey, and after a long jour nej a Britisher looks for a little alcohol, if only to restore heat to his famished system. But at the side of each plate there stood the stern glass of uninviting ice-water. I had to put up with a tup of tea, and even that was a concession in a country where tea does not hold a high place in the estimate of the menu. But was it not an astounding spectacle to find in the political capital of that great nation, with its ruler one of the guests and a body of politicians and journalists gathered together for a jollification, that there was not a single drop of good wine or healthy whisky to he had? Washington had gone dry." As to the general question, Mr O’Connor says:— “The ‘dry’ campaign took its modem origin in THE NEGRO OK THE SOOTH. It was found that whilst the negro kept from whisky he was genial, docile, and very human; the bad and the excitable ones often lost their senses the momei.t they t»mk whisky ; and the hideous crimes, with their terrible punishment, were nearly always traceable to whisky. The movement, begun in ore Southern State, spread afier ihe strange fashion of America —where movements, especially moral movements, are as much quicker and more infectious than our as their prairie fire is to our smouldering grass - the movement spread to other Southern States, till in the end there were few Southern States that did not vote themselves dry; and when one remembers the large part the mint julep and Kentucky whisky and the moonshiners played in Southern life, the phenomenon becomes the more remarkable.

HOW PROHIBITION CAME. “Meantime, the Prohibition Party - always a powerful and a<t;.,- force in American life—there have been frequently candidates for the President y on the Prohibition ticket was agitating with feverish energy; you jostle in the lobbies of the Washington ho tels almost every day against the 1<»I> b\ ist of the Prohibitionist in tin* one corner and thr lobbyist of the liqu«'i trade in the Other. The Prohibition movement had the advantage of having amongst its most earnest advocates William Jennings Bryan still one of the most powerful and apjiealing ora tors of his country. Two other factors were almost as important in spreading the Prohibition movement. I he first was the disrepute into which everything and everybody German fell after the declaration of war; and the most powerful backing to the liquor trade and incidentally to the German propaganda before the war tame fioni the big German brewers, tn.unlx ir Milwaukee. The second and even more powerful. all\ of Prohibition was t le war itself. “One of the reasons for extending Prohibition was CARE FOR THE SOLDIERS In many, if not in all, parts of the country it was against the rule to offer a man in khaki an\thing to drink; just as it was wrong for him to accept it. I went one day to take lum h wi*h my friend Winston Churchill, the nove list, at a soldiers’ and sailors’ club; and there 1 saw all these boys eating their lunches with either bed tea, bed coffee or iced water. 1 need scarcely say that one result of this rule, hard and stern as it was, you could see at once in the splendid physical form of these boys soon after their enlistment.

“This extraordinary docility- if that be the proper word —with which the Americans have accepted all tin- sa< rifices and efforts imposed upon them by the war is illustrated in the interesting article from Mr Frank Dilnot, your admirable corre*q>ondent in New York, which appeared last week. lie tells us that bre..d cards and “othei means of conserving food are unknown to us.” Yet more than twelve millions of families have signed pledges to observe the rules of the Food administration. And now comes

THIS LAST BIG APPEAI To the patriotic self-abnegation e the people. Prohibition, from bcinj local, is carried nation-wide; no del* is allowed; no compensation is evef discussed; eighty millions sterlin, air lost to the revenue; no mattn ‘Wherefor it is so ordered,’ sh\s til ‘New York Tribune.* ‘lt is not eve dis» ussrd. People do not want i* di« cussed. Nobody protests.** \\a there ever a more monumental sen tencc describing a more monument; achievement? And this is the pcopl whom the fop Benistorff des< ribed t the Kaiser, with his child's und« velo|x*d. brain, as a nation so selfish luxury loving, so absorbed in dollar and cents, as to be innocuous! The know better in Berlin now ; but not a well as the\ will know l>\ and b\.*’