The effect of Prohibition, sumptuary law enacted in government, upon the political fabric of the government, should claim the serious attention of American citizens particularly. We can hardly recur to the consideration of this subject too often.

Prohibition is essentially a repressive measure, and all history shows that repressive measures, under ordinary conditions, not only fail, but worse than fail. In aiming to do away with one evil, Prohibitionists set up a vastly greater one. In our American political life the very worst political conditions may ensue.

Prohibition laws do not actually prohibit, as every one knows; but they do bring about a state of affairs, upon whatever scale attempted, abhorrent to every right-thinking person. As to some of the results, Professor Hugo Munsterberg, of Harvard University, says:

“Judges know how rapidly the value of the oath sinks in courts where violation of the prohibition laws is a frequent charge, and how habitual perjury becomes tolerated by respectable people. The city politicians know still better how closely blackmail and corruption hang together, in the social psychology, with the enforcement of laws that strike against the belief and traditions of wider circles. The public service becomes degraded, the public conscience becomes dulled. And can there be any doubt that disregard of laws is the most dangerous psychological factor in our present-day American civilization.”

And upon this question of the effectiveness of Prohibitory legislation, and the effects of such legislation on the moral life of the nation, the Committee of Fifty on the Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem in its exhaustive report published in 1905, said:

“There has been concurrent evil of prohibitory legislation. The efforts to enforce it during forty years have had some unlooked-for effects on public respect for courts, judicial proceedings, oaths and laws in general, and for officers of the law, legislators and public servants.... The public has seen law defied, a whole generation of habitual law-breakers schooled in evasion and shamelessness, courts ineffective through fluctuations of policy, delays, perjuries, negligencies and other miscarriages of justice, officers of the law double-faced and mercenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypocritical and truckling, and office-holders unfaithful to pledges and public expectation. Through an agitation which has always had a moral end, these immoralities have been developed and made conspicuous.”

Representative Claude U. Stone, of Illinois, in the debate in Congress over the Hobson resolution for National Prohibition, said:

“There is State-wide prohibition in Maine, and the Webb-Kenyon law prevents the overriding of that law by other States, and yet there are cities in Maine that have more shops per capita for the public sale of liquor than my home city, which is the greatest distilling city in the world. In parts of Maine candidates for sheriff, who have the enforcing of the law, cannot be elected to office if they do not give a public pledge that they will violate their oath of office and will not enforce the laws. The same can be said of Georgia, another prohibition State. It is for this reason that the people should be permitted to determine by their own votes the character of restraint that should be placed upon themselves.”

In the same debate in Congress, Representative Julius Kahn, of California, remarked:

“Mr. Speaker, prohibition is not temperance. Temperance makes for human progress. It should be invoked in regard to our food, our drink, our dress, and even our physical exercise. As many people die from overeating as die from excessive use of alcohol. Excessive physical exercise has frequently led to heart failure and death. Temperance not alone in the use of alcohol, but temperance in everything that affects the human race, is what should be taught in the homes and schools of this country. Temperance harms no one, on the contrary, it does good. Prohibition on the other hand, has generally resulted in making men liars, sneaks and hypocrites. If men want liquor, they can invariably get it, and they can get it even in prohibition States.”

The testimony is quite overwhelming: that Prohibition in government corrupts courts, encourages false oaths, intimidates legislators, causes public officials to be double-faced and mercenary; makes sneaks, liars and hypocrites out of men; increases bribery; opens the way for illegal traffic, and fosters an immoral negligence of law and order! And in addition to all this, it lessens drunkenness not a whit; but on the contrary, increases intemperance, making it more possible and perhaps more inviting to those unable to curb the appetite.

What an indictment is this of prohibition; and being true, it would seem these well-established and undeniable facts concerning the results of Prohibition would serve to convince the citizen who is governed by reason and sound judgment rather than by sentiment and emotion, that Prohibition in its practical development is a real menace to the American system of government!