BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.

CHAPTER V.—PROHIBITION.

The champions of temperance have to contend with two chief adversaries—ignorance and organized crime. The well-organized liquor league can boast of leaders whose want of principles is not extenuated by want of information, and who deliberately scheme to coin the misery of their fellowmen into dollars and cents. But the machinations of such enemies of mankind would not have availed them against the power of public opinion, if their cunning had not found a potent ally in the ignorance, not of their victims only, but of their passive opponents. We need the moral and intellectual support of a larger class of our fellow-citizens, before we can hope to secure the effectual aid of legal remedies, and in that direction the chief obstacles to the progress of our cause have been the prevailing misconceptions on the following points:

1. Competence of Legislative Power.—There can be no doubt that the legislative authority even of civilized governments has been frequently misapplied. The most competent exponents of political economy agree that the state has no business to meddle in such affairs as the fluctuation of market prices, the rate of interest, the freedom of international traffic. On more than one occasion European governments, having attempted to regulate the price of bread-stuffs, etc., were taught the folly of such interference by commercial dead-locks and the impossibility of procuring the necessaries of life at the prescribed price, and were thus compelled to remedy the mischief by repealing their enactments. Usury laws tend to increase, instead of decreasing, the rate of interest, by obliging the usurer to indemnify himself for the disadvantage of the additional risk. The attempt to increase national revenues by enforcing an artificial balance of trade has ever defeated its own object. It is almost equally certain that compulsory charities do on the whole more harm than good. On the other hand, there are no more undoubtedly legitimate functions of government than the suppression, and the, if possible, prevention, of crime, and the enforcement of health laws; and it can be demonstrated by every rule of logic and equity that the liquor traffic can be held amenable in both respects. The favorite argument of our opponents is the distinction of crime and vice. For the latter, they tell us, society has no remedy, except in as much as the natural consequences (disease, destitution, etc.) are apt to recoil on the person of the perpetrator; the evil of intemperance therefore is beyond the reach of the law. We may fully concede the premises without admitting the cogency of the conclusion. The suspected possession or private use of intoxicating liquors would hardly justify the issue of a search warrant, but the penalties of the law can with full justice be directed against the manufacturer or vender who seeks gain by tempting his fellowmen to indulge in a poison infallibly injurious in any quantity, and infallibly tending to the development of a body and soul corrupting habit; they may with equal justice be directed against the consumer, stupefied or brutalized by the effects of that poison. The rumseller has no right to plead the consent of his victim. The absence of violence or “malice prepense,”[1] is a plea that would legalize some of the worst offenses against society. The peddler of obscene literature poisons the souls of our children without a shadow of ill-will against his individual customer. The gambler, the lottery-shark, use no manner of force in the pursuit of their prey. By what logic can we justify the interdiction of their industry and condemn that of the liquor traffic? By the criterion of comparative harmlessness? Have all the indecencies published since the invention of printing occasioned the thousandth part of the misery caused by the yearly and inevitable consequences of the poison vice? The lottery player may lose or win, but the customer of the liquor vender is doomed to loss as soon as he approaches the dram-shop. The damage sustained by the habitual player may be confined to a loss of money, while the habitual drunkard is sure to suffer in health, character and reputation, as well as in purse. And shall we condone the conduct of the befuddled drunkard on account of a temporary suspense of conscious reason? That very dementation constitutes his offense.

His actions may or may not result in actual mischief, but he has put the decision of that event beyond his control. The man who gallops headlong through crowded streets is punished for his reckless disregard of other men’s safety, though the hoofs of his horse may have failed to inflict any actual injury. A menagerie keeper would be arrested, if not lynched, for turning a city into a pandemonium by letting loose his bears and hyenas, and for the same reason no man should be permitted to turn himself into a wild beast.

“Virtue must come from within,” says Prof. Newman;[2] “to this problem religion and morality must direct themselves. But vice may come from without; to hinder this is the care of the statesman.” And here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than cure. By obviating the temptations of the dram-shop a progressive vice with an incalculable train of mischievous consequences may be nipped in the bud. Penal legislation is a sham if it takes cognizance of moral evils only after they have passed the curable stage. “It is mere mockery,” says Cardinal Manning,[3] “to ask us to put down drunkenness by moral and religious means, when the legislature facilitates the multiplication of the incitements to intemperance on every side. You might as well call upon me as a captain of a ship and say: ‘Why don’t you pump the water out when it is sinking,’ when you are scuttling the ship in every direction. If you will cut off the supply of temptation, I will be bound by the help of God to convert drunkards, but until you have taken off this perpetual supply of intoxicating drink we never can cultivate the fields. Let the legislature do its part and we will answer for the rest.”

All civilized nations have recognized not only the right but the duty of legislative authorities to adopt the most stringent measures for the prevention of contagious disease; yet all epidemics taken together have not caused half as much loss of life and health as the plague of the poison vice.

2. Magnitude of the Evil.—Since health and freedom began to be recognized as the primary conditions of human welfare, the conviction is gaining ground that the principles of our legislative system need a general revision. It was a step in the right direction when the lawgivers of the Middle Ages began to realize the truth that the liberty of individual action should be sacrificed only to urgent consideration of public welfare, but the modified theories on the comparative importance of these considerations have inaugurated a still more important reform. Penal codes gradually ceased to enforce ceremonies and abstruse dogmas and to ignore monstrous municipal and sanitary abuses. The time has passed when legislators raged with extreme penalties against the propagandists of speculative theories and ignored the propagation of slum diseases, yet, after all, there is still a lingering belief in the minds of many contemporaries that intemperance, as a physical evil, a “mere dietetic excess,” does not justify the invasion of personal liberty. They would consent to restrict the freedom of thought and speech rather than the license of the rum-dealer, yet the tendency of a progressive advance in public opinion promises the advent of a time when that license will appear the chief anomaly of the present age. The numberless minute prescriptions and interdicts of our law books and their silence on the crime of the liquor traffic will make it difficult for coming ages to comprehend the intellectual status of a generation that could wage such uncompromising war against microscopic gnats and consent to gratify the greed of a monstrous vampire.

3. Self-correcting Abuses.—Modern physicians admit that various forms of disease which were formerly treated with drastic drugs can be safely trusted to the healing agencies of nature. Many social evils, too, tend to work out their own cure. High markets encourage competition and have led to a reduction of prices. Luxury leads to enforced economy by reducing the resources of the spendthrift. Dishonest tradesmen lose custom, and a German government that used to fine editors for publishing unverified rumors might have left it to the subscribers to withdraw their patronage from a purveyor of unreliable news. But there are certain causes of disease that demand the interference of art. Poisons, especially, require artificial antidotes. If a child has mistaken arsenic for sugar, its life commonly depends on the timely arrival of a physician. The organism may rid itself of a surfeit, but is unable to eliminate the virus of a skin disease. Alcoholism belongs to the same class of disorders. We need not legislate against corsets; the absurdities of fashion change and vanish like fleeting clouds, and their votaries may welcome the change; but drunkards would remain slaves of their vice though the verdict of public opinion should have made dram-drinking extremely unfashionable. The morbid passion transmitted from sire to son, and strengthened by years of indulgence, would defy all moral restraints and yield only to the practical impossibility to obtain the object of its desire.

“A number of years ago,” says Dr. Isaac Jennings, “I was called to the shipyard in Derby, to see John B., a man about thirty years of age, of naturally stout, robust constitution, who had fallen from a scaffold in a fit, head first upon a spike below. In my visit to dress the wounded head, I spoke to him of the folly and danger of continuing to indulge his habit of drinking, and obtained from him a promise that he would abandon it. Not long after I learned that he was drinking again, and reminded him of his promise. His excuse was, that it would not do for him to abandon the practice of drinking suddenly. A few weeks after this he called at my office and requested me to bleed him, or do something to prevent a fit, for he felt much as he did a short time before having the last fit. I said to him, ‘John, sit down here with me and let us consider your case a little.’ I drew two pictures and held before him; one presented a wife and three little children with a circle of friends made happy and himself respectable and useful in society; the other, a wretched family, and himself mouldering in a drunkard’s grave; and appealed to him to decide which should prove to be the true picture. The poor fellow burst into tears and wept like a child. When he had recovered himself from sobbing so that he could speak he said: ‘Doctor, to tell you the truth, it is not that I am afraid of the consequences of stopping suddenly that I do not give up drinking. I can not do it. I have tried and tried again, but it is all in vain. Sometimes I have gone a number of weeks without drinking, and I flattered myself that the temptation was gone, but it returned, and now if there was a spot on earth where men lived and could not get spirits, and I could get there, I would start in a minute.’ I thought I had understood something of the difficulties of hard drinkers before, but this gave me a new impression of the matter, and most solemnly did I charge myself to do what I could to make a spot on earth where men could live and couldn’t get spirits.”

4. Lesser Evils.—Even in a stricter form than any rational friend of temperance would desire its enforcement, prohibition would not involve any consequences that could possibly make the cure a greater evil than the disease. The predicted aching void resulting from the expurgation of beer-tunnels could be filled by healthier means of recreation. The grief of the superseded poison-mongers would not outweigh the mountain-load of misery and woe which the abolishment of their cursed trade would lift from the shoulders of the nation. When the state of Iowa declared for prohibition the opponents of that amendment bemoaned the loss entailed by the departure of “so many industrious and respectable citizens,” i. e., from the exodus of the rumsellers! We might just as well be asked to bewail the doom of the Thugs[4] as the subversion of a prosperous industry. We might as well be requested to sympathize with the respectable bloodhound-trainers and knout-manufacturers whom the abolition of slavery threw out of employment. The liquor dealer has no right to complain about the rigor of a law that permits him to depart with the spoils of such a trade. We are told that the mere rumor of Maine laws has deterred many foreigners from making their homes with us; that the Russian peasants decline to come without their brewers and distillers, and that by general prohibition we would risk to reduce our immigration from every country of northern Europe. We must take that risk, and let Muscovites rot in the bogs of the Volga if they can not accept our hospitality without turning our bread corn into poison. Our utilitarian friends would hardly persuade us to legalize cannibalism in order to encourage a larger immigration of Fiji islanders. The absence of such guests might not prove an unqualified evil. I shall not insult the intelligence of my readers by repeating the drivel of the wretches who would weigh the reduction of revenues against the happiness of a hell-delivered nation, and I will only mention the reply of a British financier who estimates that the increase of national prosperity would offset that reduction in less than five years.

5. Efficacy of Prohibition.—Will prohibition prevent the use of intoxicating liquor? Not wholly, but it will answer its purpose. It will banish distilleries to secret mountain glens and hidden cellars. It will drive the man-traps of the poison-monger from the public streets. It will save our boys from a hundred temptations; it will help thousands of reformed drunkards to keep their pledge; it will restore peace and plenty to many hundred thousand homes. More than a century ago the philosopher Leibnitz[5] maintained that the plenary suppression of the liquor traffic would be the most effectual means for reforming the moral status of civilized nations, and experience has since fully demonstrated the correctness of that opinion. A memorandum endorsed by a large number of statistical vouchers describes the effect of prohibition in Sweden: “The nation rose and fell, grew prosperous and happy, or miserable and degraded, as its rulers and law-makers restrained or permitted the manufacture and sale of that which all along the track of its history has seemed to be the nation’s greatest curse.” … “The vigorously maintained prohibition against spirits in 1753-1756, and again in 1772-1775, proved the enormous benefits effected in moral, economical, and other respects, by abstinence from intoxicating spirits.” … “This it is which has so helped Sweden to emerge from moral and material prostration, and explains the existence of such general indications in that country of comfort and independence among all classes.”

From the Edinburgh Review for January, 1873, we learn that in eighty-nine private estates in England and Scotland, “the drink traffic has been altogether suppressed, with the happiest social results. The late Lord Palmerston[6] suppressed the beer shops in Romsey as the leases fell in. We know an estate which stretches for miles along the romantic shore of Loch Fyne,[7] where no whiskey is allowed to be sold. The peasants and fishermen are flourishing. They have all their money in the bank, and they obtain higher wages than their neighbors when they go to sea”—a proof that a small oasis of temperance can maintain its prosperity in the midst of poison-blighted communities.

Here and there the wiles of the poison-mongers will undoubtedly succeed in evading the law, but their power for mischief will be diminished as that of the gambling-hell was diminished in Homburg and Baden,[8] where temptation was removed out of the track of the uninitiated till the host of victims dwindled away for want of recruits. Not the promptings of an innate passion, but the charm of artificial allurements is the gate by which ninety-nine out of a hundred drunkards have entered the road to ruin. It would be an understatement to say that the temptation of minors will be reduced a hundred fold wherever the total amount of sales has been reduced as much as five fold—a result which has been far exceeded, even under the present imperfect system of legal control. “In the course of my duty as an Internal Revenue officer,” says Superintendent Hamlin of Bangor, “I have become thoroughly acquainted with the state and extent of the liquor traffic in Maine, and I have no hesitation in saying that the beer trade is not more than one per cent. of what I remember it to have been, and the trade in distilled liquors is not more than ten per cent. of what it was formerly.” “I think I am justified in saying,” reports the Attorney-General, “that there is not an open bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor in this county” (Androscoggin, including the manufacturing district of Lewiston—once a very hotbed of the rum traffic). “In the city of Biddeford, a manufacturing place of 11,000 inhabitants, for a month at a time not a single arrest for drunkenness has been made or become necessary.” And from Augusta (the capital of the state): “If we were to say that the quantity of liquor sold here is not one-tenth as large as formerly, we think it would be within the truth; and the favorable effects of the change upon all the interests of the state are plainly seen everywhere.”

“It is perhaps not necessary,” says the Boston Globe, of July 29, 1875, “to dwell on the evils of intemperance, and yet people seldom think how great a proportion of these might be prevented by driving the iniquity into its hiding places, and preventing it from coming forth to lure its victims from among the unwary and comparatively guileless. Few young men who are worth saving, or are likely to be saved to decency and virtue, would seek it out if it were kept from sight. But when it comes forth in gay and alluring colors, it draws a procession of our youth into a path that has an awful termination. Nor does the evil which springs from an open toleration of the way in which this vice carries on its traffic of destruction fall only on men. A sad proportion of its victims is made up from shop girls and abandoned women who are not so infatuated at the start that they would plunge into a life of infamy if its temptations were strictly under the ban, and kept widely separated from the world of decency. But it intruded itself upon them. Its temptations and opportunities are before their eyes, and the way is made easy for their feet to go down to death.”

“To what good is it,” says Lord Brougham,[9] “that the legislature should pass laws to punish crime, or that their lordships should occupy themselves in trying to improve the morals of the people by giving them education? What could be the use of sowing a little seed here and plucking up a weed there, if these beer shops are to be continued to sow the seeds of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating the most frightful produce that ever has been allowed to grow up in a civilized country, and, I am ashamed to add, under the fostering care of Parliament.”

The prohibition of the poison traffic has become the urgent duty of every legislator, the foremost aim of every moral reformer. The verdict of the most eminent statesmen, physicians, clergymen, patriots and philanthropists, is unanimous on that point. We lack energy, not competence, nor the sanction of a higher authority, to gain the votes of the masses.

“We can prove the success of prohibition by the experience of our neighboring state,” writes Dr. Herbert Buchanan, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; “all the vicious elements of society are arraigned against us, but I have no fear of the event if we do not cease to agitate the subject.”

Agitation, a ceaseless appeal to the common sense and conscience of our fellowmen can, indeed, not fail to be crowned with ultimate success. The struggle with vice, with ignorance and mean selfishness may continue, but it will be our own fault if our adversaries can support their opposition by a single valid argument, and the battle will be more than half won if a majority of our fellow-citizens have to admit that we contend no longer for a favor, but for an evident right.