If a German stands up to talk about prohibition, he might just as well
sit down at once, for every one in America, of course, knows
beforehand what he is going to say. Worse, every one knows also
exactly why he is so anxious to say it: how can he help being on the
wrong side of this question? And especially if he has been a student
in Germany, he will have brought the drinking habit along with him
from the Fatherland, together with his cigar smoking and card playing
and duelling. If a poor man relies on his five quarts of heavy Munich
beer a day, how can he ever feel happy if he is threatened with no
license in his town and with no beer in his stein? Yet my case seems
slightly different. I never in my life played cards, I never fought a
duel, and when the other day in a large women's college, after an
address and a reception, the lady president wanted to comfort me and
suggested that I go into the next room and smoke a cigar, I told her
frankly that I could do it if it were the rule in her college, but
that it would be my first cigar. With beer it is different: Last
winter in traveling I was for some days the guest of an Episcopal
clergyman, who, anticipating the visit of a German, had set up a
bottle of excellent beer as a welcome, and we drank together the
larger part of the bottle--but I think that is my only case in late
years. When I had to attend a Students' "Commers," I was always
protected by the thick mug through which no one could discover that
the contents never became less during the evening. I live most
comfortably in a pleasant temperance town which will, I hope, vote
no-license year by year as long as freshmen stroll over the old
Harvard Yard. And although I have become pretty much Americanized, I
have never drunk a cocktail.
The problem of prohibition, thus, does not affect my thirst, but it
greatly interests my scientific conscience; not as a German, but as a
psychologist I feel impelled to add a word to the discussion which is
suddenly reverberating over the whole country. But is it really a
discussion which we hear? Is it not rather a one-sided denunciation of
alcohol, repeated a million times with louder and louder voice, an
outcry ever swelling in its vehemence? On the other side there may be
the protests of the distillers and brewers and wine-growers and
bottle-makers and saloon-keepers, and perhaps some timid declarations
of thirsty societies--but such protests do not count, since they have
all the earmarks of selfishness; they are ruled out, and no one
listens, just as no one would consult the thieves if a new statute
against pickpockets were planned. So far as the really disinterested
public is concerned, the discussion is essentially one-sided. If
serious men like Cardinal Gibbons raise their voices in a warning
against prohibition, they are denounced and overborne, and no one
cares to imitate them.
_The Fundamental Evil of American Public Opinion_
It has been seldom indeed that the fundamental evil of American public
opinion has come out so clearly; namely, that no one dares to be on
the unpopular side; just as in fashion and social life, every one
wants to be "in it." No problem has in America a fair hearing as soon
as one side has become the fashion of mind. Only the cranks come out
with an unbalanced, exaggerated opposition and thus really help the
cause they want to fight against. The well-balanced thinkers keep
quiet and simply look on while the movement rushes forward, waiting
quietly for the reaction which sets in from the inner absurdity of
every social extreme. The result is too often an hysterical zig-zag
movement, where fearlessness might have found a middle way of steady
progress. There must be indeed a possible middle way between the evil
of the present saloon and the not lesser evil of a future national
prohibition; yet if this one-sidedness of discussion goes on, it is
not difficult to foresee, after the legislative experiences of the
last year, that the hysterical movement will not stop until
prohibition is proclaimed from every state-house between the Atlantic
and the Pacific.
Exaggerated denunciation of the prohibition movement is, of course,
ineffective. Whoever simply takes sides with the saloon-keeper and his
clientele--yes, whoever is blind to the colossal harm which alcohol
has brought and is now bringing to the whole country--is unfit to be
heard by those who have the healthy and sound development of the
nation at heart. The evils which are connected with the drinking habit
are gigantic; thousands of lives and many more thousands of households
are the victims every year; disease and poverty and crime grow up
where alcohol drenches the soil. To deny it means to ignore the
teachings of medicine and economics and criminology.
But is this undeniable fact really a proof of the wisdom of
prohibition? The railroads of the United States injured last year more
than one hundred thousand persons and put out seven thousand hopeful
lives; does any sane man argue that we ought to abolish railroads? The
stock exchange has brought in the last year economic misery to
uncounted homes, but even at the height of the panic no one wanted to
destroy the market for industrial stocks. How much crime and disaster
and disease and ruin have come into the lives of American youth
through women, and yet who doubts that women are the blessing of the
whole national life? To say that certain evils come from a certain
source suggests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source
before studying whether greater evils might not result from its
destruction, and without asking whether the evils might not be
reduced, and the good from the same source remain untouched and
untampered with. Even if a hollow tooth aches, the modern dentist does
not think of pulling it; that would be the remedy of the clumsy
village barber. The evils of drink exist, and to neglect their cure
would be criminal, but to rush on to the conclusion that every
vineyard ought therefore to be devastated is unworthy of the logic of
a self-governing nation. The other side has first to show its case.
"_Better England Free Than England Sober?_"
This does not mean that every argument of the other side is valid. In
most of the public protestations, especially from the Middle West, far
too much is made of the claim that all the Puritanic laws and the
whole prohibitionist movement are an interference with personal
liberty. It is an old argument, indeed, "Better England free than
England sober." For public meetings it is just the kind of protest
which resounds well and rolls on nobly. We are at once in the midst of
the "most sacred" rights. Who desires that America, the idol of
those who seek freedom from the tyranny of the Old World, shall
trample on the right of personal liberty? And yet those hundreds
of singing-societies which have joined in this outburst of moral
indignation have forgotten that every law is a limitation of personal
liberty. The demand of the nation must limit the demands of the
individual, even if it is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who
is directly hurt. No one wants to see the lottery or gambling-houses
or the free sale of morphine and cocaine permitted, or slavery, even
though a man were to offer himself for sale, or polygamy, even though
all wives should consent. To prevent temptation toward ruinous
activities is truly the State's best right, and no injury to personal
liberty. The German reflects gladly how much more the German State
apparently intrudes upon personal freedom: for instance, in its
splendid State insurance for old age and accidents.
To be sure, from this German viewpoint it is hard to understand why
the right of the State to subordinate personal wishes to national ones
should not carry with it a duty to make compensation. To him the
actions of some Southern States appear simply as the confiscation of
property. When, as has happened, a captain of industry erects, for
instance, a most costly brewery, and the State in the following year
prohibits the sale of beer, turning the large, new establishment into
a huge, useless ruin, without giving the slightest compensation, the
foreigner stands aghast, wondering if to-morrow a party which believes
in the State ownership of railroads may not prohibit railroading by
private companies without any payment to the present owners.
Yet the political aspect does not concern the social psychologist. I
abstract from it as from many others. There is, indeed, no limit to
the problems which ought to be studied most seriously before such a
gigantic revolution is organized. The physician may ask whether and
when alcohol is real medicine, and the physiologist may study whether
it is a food and whether it is rightly taken as helpful to nutrition;
but this is not our problem. The theologians may quarrel as to whether
the Bible praises the wine or condemns the drinker, whether Christ
really turned water into that which we call wine, and whether
Christianity as such stands for abstinence. It is matter for the
economist to ask what will become of the hundred thousands of men who
are working to-day in the breweries and related industries. A labor
union claims that "over half a million men would be thrown out of
employment by general prohibition, who, with their families, would
make an army of a million human beings robbed of their means of
existence." And the economist, again, may consider what it might mean
to take out the license taxes from the city budgets and the hundreds
of millions of internal revenue from the budget of the whole country.
It is claimed that the brewers, maltsters, and distillers pay out for
natural and manufactured products, for labor, transportation, etc.,
seven hundred million dollars annually; that their aggregate
investments foot up to more than three thousand millions; and that
their taxes contribute three hundred and fifty millions every year to
the public treasuries. Can the country afford to ruin an industry of
such magnitude? Such weighty problems cannot be solved in the Carrie
Nation style: yet they are not ours here.
_The Lonely Drinker of the Temperance Town_
Nearer to our psychological interest comes the well-known war-cry,
"Prohibition does not prohibit." It is too late in the day to need to
prove it by statistics: every one knows it. No one has traveled in
prohibition States who has not seen the sickening sight of drunkards
of the worst order. The drug-stores are turned into very remunerative
bars, and through hidden channels whiskey and gin flood the community.
The figures of the United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue tell
the story publicly. In a license State like Massachusetts, there
exists one retail liquor dealer for every 525 of population; in a
prohibition State like Kansas, one for every 366. But the secret story
is much more alarming. What is the effect? As far as the health of the
nation and its mental training in self-control and in regulation of
desires are concerned, the result must be dangerous, because, on the
whole, it eliminates the mild beverages in favor of the strong drinks
and substitutes lonely drinking for drinking in social company. Both
are psychologically and physiologically a turn to the worse. It is not
the mild beer and light wine which are secretly imported; it is much
easier to transport and hide whiskey and rum, with their strong
alcoholic power and stronger effect on the nerve-cells of the brain.
And of all forms of drinking none is more ruinous than the solitary
drink, as soon as the feeling of repugnance has been overcome; there
is no limit and no inhibition. If I look back over the last years, in
which I often studied the effects of suggestion and hypnotism on
habitual drinkers, I do not hesitate to say that it was in most cases
an easy thing to cure the social drinker of the large cities, but very
hard to break the lonely drinker of the temperance town. Of course,
prohibition reduces somewhat the whole quantity of consumption, but it
withdraws the stimulant, in most cases, where it would do the least
harm and intensifies the harm to the organism where it is most
dangerous.
_Our Greatest Danger--Disregard for Law_
But man is not only a nervous system. Prohibition forced by a majority
on an unwilling minority will always remain a living source of the
spirit of disregard for law. Yet, "unwilling" minority is too weak an
epithet; the question is of a minority which considers the arbitrary
rule undemocratic, absurd, immoral, and which really believes that it
is justified in finding a way around a contemptible law.
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 respected 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 beliefs and traditions of wider circles. The
public service becomes degraded, the public conscience becomes dulled.
And can there be any doubt that disregard of law is the most dangerous
psychological factor in our present-day American civilization? It is
not lynch law which is the worst; the crimes against life are twenty
times more frequent than in Europe, and as for the evils of commercial
life which have raised the wrath of the whole well-meaning nation in
late years, has not disregard of law been their real source? In a
popular melodrama the sheriff says solemnly: "I stand here for the
law"; and when the other shouts in reply, "I stand for common sense!"
night after night the public breaks out into jubilant applause. To
foster this immoral negligence of law by fabricating hasty,
ill-considered laws in a hysterical mood, laws which almost tempt
toward a training in violation of them, is surely a dangerous
experiment in social psychology.
_Are We About to Prohibit Meat and Tea?_
Hasty and hysterical that kind of law-making is indeed. Within a few
years, during which the situation itself has not been changed, during
which no new discoveries have proved the right or necessity, during
which no experts have reached common results, the wave has swollen
to a devastating flood. Who let it loose? Were the psychologists
asked to decide, or the physicians, or the physiologists, or the
sociologists, or any one who has studied the problem as a whole with
professional knowledge? Certainly not: their commissions have hardly
ever proposed total abstinence. Of course, those who rush on mean the
best as they see it; they want to make better men; but can a
nation ever hope to reach private morality by law and thus to
exclude all private lying and greediness and envy and ingratitude
and temper and unfairness just as well as intemperance? Such unclear
and vague mixing of purposes always characterizes hysterical
legislation. A sober contemplator must ask himself: What is it to
lead to if well-meaning, short-sighted dilettantes can force
legislation on questions which demand the most serious expert study?
There is growing throughout the land to-day a conviction--which has
its core of truth--that many people eat too much meat; and not a few
see a remedy in vegetarianism and Fletcherism. If this prejudice
swells in a similar way, the time may come when one State after the
other will declare slaughtering illegal, confiscate the meat-packing
houses, and prohibit the poisonous consumption of beef and the killing
of any creature that can look on us with eyes. Other groups are
fighting coffee and tea, and we may finally land in nuts and salads.
Yes, according to this line of legislative wisdom, there is no reason
for prohibiting only alcohol. Do I go far beyond the facts in
asserting that in certain States the same women and men who are
publicly against every use of alcohol are also opposed to the "drugs"
of the physicians and speak of them privately as poisons? Not the
Christian Scientists only--in intellectual Boston thousands of
educated women speak of drugs and nervine as belonging to a medieval
civilization which they have outgrown. The same national logic may
thus lead us to laws which will prohibit every physician from using
the resources of the drug-store--if they have not all simply to go
over to osteopathy.
_A Spring Flood of Emotional Legislation_
The question of the liquor trade and temperance--which is so widely
different from a hasty prohibition--has engaged the minds of all times
and of all nations, and is studied everywhere to-day with the means of
modern science. But this spring flood of prohibition legislation which
has overrun the States shows few signs of deeper connection with
serious study and fewer signs of profit from the experiments of the
past. When the Chinese government made laws against intemperance about
eleven hundred years before Christ, it can hardly have gone more
hastily to work than the members of this movement of the twentieth
century after Christ. It is unworthy of women and men who want to
stand for sobriety to allow themselves to become intoxicated with
hysterical outcries, when a gigantic national question is to be
solved, a question which can never be solved until it is solved
rightly. A wrong decision must necessarily lead to a social reaction
which can easily wipe out every previous gain.
Progress is to be hoped for only from the most careful analysis of all
the factors of this problem; yet, instead, the nation leaves it to the
unthinking, emotional part of the population. In the years of the
silver agitation it was a matter of admiration to any foreigner, the
wonderful seriousness with which large crowds listened in a hundred
towns, evening after evening, to long hours of difficult technical
discussion on currency; sixteen to one was really discussed by the
whole nation, and arguments were arrayed against arguments before a
decision was reached. Is it necessary that the opposite method be
taken as soon as this problem is touched--a question far more complex
and difficult than the silver question, and of far more import to the
moral habits and the development of the nation? When leading scholars
bring real arguments on both sides of the problem, their work is
buried in archives, and no one is moved to action. But when a Chicago
minister hangs the American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large
patch of black color on it, declares that the patch stands for the
liquor evil which smirches the country, denounces wildly the men who
spend for whiskey the money which ought to buy medicine for sick
children, and then madly tears the black cloth from the stars and
stripes and grinds it under his heel--then thousands rush out as
excited as if they had heard a convincing argument. And this
superficiality is the more repellent because every glimpse below the
surface shows an abundance of cant and hypocrisy and search for cheap
fame and sensationalism and still more selfish motives mingled with
the whole movement; even the agitation itself, with its threats of
ruin, borders too often on graft and blackmail and thus helps to
debauch the public life.
_Alcohol and the Brain_
Those who seriously study, not merely the one or the other symptom,
but the whole situation, can hardly doubt that the demand of true
civilization is for temperance and not for abstinence, and that
complete prohibition must in the long run work against real
temperance. But nothing is more characteristic of the hysterical
caprice of the masses than the constant neglect of this distinction.
Even the smallest dose of alcohol is for them nothing but evil, and
triumphantly they seize on isolated statements of physiologists who
acknowledge that every dose of alcohol has a certain influence on the
brain. This is at once given the turn that every glass of beer or wine
"muddles" the brain and is therefore a sin against the freedom of
man.
Certainly every glass of beer has an influence on the cells of the
brain and on the mind; so has every cup of tea or coffee, every bit of
work and every amusement, every printed page and every spoken word. Is
it certain that the influence is harmful because an overdose of the
same stimulants is surely poisonous? Boiling water is most dangerous
for the body on account of its strong heat: is a bath in lukewarm
water therefore also harmful? To climb Mount Blanc would overtax my
heart: is it therefore inadvisable for me to climb the two flights to
my laboratory? Of course, under certain conditions it might be wise to
take account of the slightest influences. Without being harmful, they
might be unsuited to a certain mental purpose. If I were to take a
glass of beer now in the morning, I should certainly be unable to
write the next page of this essay with the same ease; the ideas would
flow more slowly. But does that indicate that I did wrong in taking
last night, after a hard day's fatiguing work, a glass of sherry and a
glass of champagne at a merry dinner-party, after which nothing but
light conversation and music were planned for the rest of the evening?
Of course, alcohol before serious intellectual work disturbs me; but
hearing a hurdy-gurdy in the street or thinking of the happy news
which a letter has just brought to me, or feeling angry over any
incident, disturbs me just as much. It is all the same kind of
interference; the brain centers which I used for my intellectual
effort are for a while inhibited and thus unfit for the work which I
have in hand. When the slight anger has evaporated, when the
pleasurable excitement has subsided, when the music is over, I can
gather my thoughts again, and it is arbitrary to claim that the short
blockade of ideas was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided the
music or the pleasure or the wine.
Of course, if we consider, for instance, the prevention of crime, we
ought not to forget that some even of these slight inhibitions may
facilitate a rash, vehement deed and check cool deliberation. In times
of social excitement, therefore, alcohol ought to be reduced. But
again this same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol is in
question, may result from many other sources of social unrest. The
real danger begins everywhere with intemperance: that is, with a lack
of that self-discipline which is not learned but lost under the outer
force of prohibition.
_The Case Psychologically_
Psychologically the case stands thus: alcohol has indeed an inhibitory
influence on mind and body. The feeling of excitement, the greater
ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength and joy, the forgetting
of sorrow and pain--all are at bottom the result of inhibition;
impulses are let free because the checking centers are inhibited. But
it is absurd to claim from the start that all this is bad and harmful,
as if the word inhibition meant destruction and lasting damage.
Harmful it is, bodily and socially, when these changes become
exaggerated, when they are projected into such dimensions that vital
interests, the care for family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but
in the inhibition itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest
act of attention which does not involve such inhibition. If I read in
my study, the mere attention to my book will inhibit the ticking of
the clock in my room and the noise from the street, and no one will
call it harmful. As soon as my attention increases, and I read with
such passion that I forget my engagements with friends and my duties
in my office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact that
the unbalanced attention makes me by its exaggerated inhibition quite
unfit for my duties, is no proof that the slight inhibition produced
by attentive reading ought to be avoided.
The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have in the right place its very
desirable purpose, and no one ought to be terrified by such
physiological statements, even if inhibition is called a partial
paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but no education, no art, no
politics, no religion, is possible without such partial paralysis.
What else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm but a
re-enforcement of certain mental states, with corresponding
inhibition--that is, paralysis--of the opposite ideas? If a moderate
use of alcohol can help in this most useful blockade, it is an ally
and not an enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness
of the little miseries and of the drudgery of life, and thus set free
and re-enforce the unchecked enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if
wine can make one forget the frictions and pains and give again the
feeling of unity and frictionless power--by all means let us use this
helper to civilization. It was a well-known philosopher who coupled
Christianity and alcohol as the two great means of mankind to set us
free from pain. But nature provided mankind with other means of
inhibition; sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in
the same direction; to inhibit means to help and to prepare for
action.
And are those who fancy that every brain alteration is an evil really
aware how other influences of our civilization hammer on the
neurones and injure our mental powers far beyond the effects of a
moderate use of alcohol? The vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of
the speculators, the sensationalism of the yellow press, the poker
playing of the men and the bridge playing of the women, the
mysticism and superstition of the new fancy churches, the hysterics
of the baseball games, the fascination of murder cases, the noise
on the Fourth of July and on the three hundred and sixty-four other
days of the year, the wild chase for success; all are poison for the
brain and mind. They make the nervous system and the will endlessly
more unfit for the duties of the day than a glass of lager beer on
a hot summer's evening.
_Drying up a Nation Emotionally_
What would result if prohibition should really prohibit, and all the
inhibitions which a mild use of beer and wine promise to the brain
really be lost? The psychological outcome would be twofold: certain
effects of alcohol which serve civilization would be lost; and, on the
other hand, much more harmful substitutions would set in. To begin
with: the nation would lose its chief means of recreation after work.
We know to-day too well that physical exercise and sport is not real
rest for the exhausted brain-cells. The American masses work hard
throughout the day. The sharp physical and mental labor, the constant
hurry and drudgery produce a state of tension and irritation which
demands before the night's sleep some dulling inhibition if a
dangerous unrest is not to set in. Alcohol relieves that daily tension
most directly.
Not less important would be the loss on the emotional side. Emotional
desire for a life in beauty would yield to the triviality of
usefulness. Puritanism has held back the real American spirit of
artistic creation in fine arts and music and drama: prohibition
without substitutes would crush still more the esthetic spirit in the
brain of man and would make beauty still more the domain of women. Her
more responsive physiological constitution does not need the
artificial paralysis of the inhibiting centers. The mind of the
average woman shows that lower degree of checking power which small
alcoholic doses produce in the average man. But just therefore she and
men of the female type cannot carry on alone the work of the nation. A
national life without the artificial inhibitions of the restraining
centers becomes for the large masses a matter of mere practical
calculation and righteous dulness. Truly the German, the Frenchman,
the Italian who enjoys his glass of light wine and then wanders joyful
and elated to the masterpieces of the opera, serves humanity better
than the New Englander who drinks his ice-water and sits satisfied at
the vaudeville show, world-far from real art. Better America inspired
than America sober. Can we forget that in almost all parts of the
globe even religious life began with intoxication cults? God Indra was
in the wine for the Hindus and Dionysius for the Greeks. It is the
optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional inspiration, which
alcohol brought into the dulness of human days, and the history of
culture shows it on every page.
But with the emotion dries up the will. Mere righteousness needs no
stimulation. But the American nation would never have achieved its
world work if the attitude of resignation had been its national trait.
Those pioneers who opened the land and awoke to life its resources
were men who longed for excitement, for the intensity of life, for
vividness of experience. The nation would not be loyal to its
tradition if it were not to foster this desire of intense experience:
the moderate use of alcohol is both training in such intensified
conscious experience and training in the control and discipline of
such states. The nation needs both, and as the child learns to prepare
for the work of life by plays and games, so man is schooling himself
for the active and effective life by the temperate use of exciting
beverages which playingly awake those vivid feelings of success. The
scholar and the minister and a thousand other individuals may not need
this training, but the millions, the masses, cannot prepare themselves
for a national career of effectiveness if this opportunity is taken
from their lives. History shows it abundantly.
To be sure, all this is but half true, because, as we said, the
individual, and finally the nation, may seek substitutes, may
satisfy the craving for emotional excitement, for will elation, for
intense experience, by other means than the oldest and most widely
scattered. Zealotism in religious belief, tyranny and cruelty,
sexual over-indulgence and perversion, gambling and betting, mysticism
and superstition, recklessness and adventurousness, and, above all,
senseless crimes have always been the psychological means of
overcoming the emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated life. They
produce, just like alcohol, that partial paralysis and create intense
experiences. They thus take hold of the masses, so long as the
social mind is not entirely dried up, with the necessity of a
psychological law. There is no more dangerous state for a healthy,
strong nation than mental monotony in the life of the masses.
Catholic countries play to the imagination at least through the
religion, monarchic countries have their own picturesqueness and
color, America under prohibition pushes the masses into gambling and
reckless excitements and sexual disorder and money-crazes and
criminal explosions of the mind.
_The Temperance Experiment in Mohammedanism_
Has not history experimented sufficiently? Prohibitionist stump
speakers may tell us that their cause means the hitherto unheard-of
progress of civilization; the United States, after abolishing
slavery for mankind, is called on to end also the tyranny of alcohol
under which humanity has suffered for ages. But are there not two
hundred millions of Moslems who are obedient to Mohammed's law,
that wine drinking is sinful? What is the outcome? Of course, it is
not inspiring to hear the boast of the Moslems that the Christians
bring whiskey to Africa and bestialize the natives, while the
Mohammedans fight alcohol. But aside from this, their life goes on in
slavery and polygamy and semi-civilization. All the strong nations,
all those whose contributions were of lasting value to the progress
of mankind, have profited from the help of artificial stimulation and
intoxicants.
But every strong nation remained also conscious of the dangers and
evils which result from intemperance. On the whole, history shows that
intemperance and abstinence alike work against the highest interests
of civilization; temperance alone offers the most favorable
psychological conditions for the highest cultural achievement.
Intemperance mostly precedes the strongest periods in the life of a
nation and follows them again as soon as decay has set in. Temperance,
that is, sufficient use of intoxicants to secure emotional inspiration
and volitional intensity, together with sufficient training in
self-discipline to avoid their evils, always introduced the fullest
blossoming of national greatness. Instinctively the American nation as
a whole is evidently striving for such temperance, but a hysterical
minority has at present succeeded in exaggerating the movement and in
transforming it into its caricature, prohibition. The final result, of
course, will be temperance, since the American nation will not
ultimately allow itself to become an emasculated nation of dyspeptic
ice-water drinkers without inspiration and energy, or permit vulgar
amusements, reckless stock-gambling, sensationalism, adultery,
burglary, and murder to furnish the excitement which the nerves of a
healthy nation need.
_The Securing of Temperance_
How temperance can be secured, the experiences of the older nations
with a similar psychological type of national mind ought to be
decisive. First of all, the beverages of strongly alcoholic nature
ought to be fought by those of light alcoholic effect. The whiskey of
the laborers must be fought by light healthy beer and perhaps by light
American wines. Further, a systematic education in self-control must
set in; the drunkard must not be tolerated under any circumstances.
Above all, the social habits in the sphere of drinking must be
entirely reshaped. They belong to a period where the Puritan spirit
considered beer and wine as sinful and relegated them to regions
hidden from decent eyes. The American saloon is the most disgusting
product of such narrowness; its dangers for politics and law, health
and economics, are alarming. The saloon must disappear and can be made
to disappear perhaps by higher license taxation and many other means.
And with it must disappear the bar and the habit of drinking standing
and of mutual treating. The restaurant alone, with the hotel and the
club, is the fit public place where guests sitting at tables may have
beer and wine with their meals or after meals,--and all controlled by
laws which absolutely forbid the sale of intoxicants to certain groups
of persons, to children, to inebriates, and so on. As long as drinking
means to the imagination of a considerable well-meaning minority of
the nation the present-day repulsive life of saloons and bars, the
minority will find it easy to terrorize and to whip into line the
whole country. But if those relics of a narrow time disappear and
customs grow which spread the spirit of geniality and friendly social
intercourse over the foaming cup, the spell will be broken. Instead of
being tyrannized over by short-sighted fanatics on the one side and
corrupt saloon-keepers on the other, the nation will proceed with the
unanimous sympathy of the best citizens to firm temperance laws which
the sound instinct of the masses will really respect. Training in
self-control as against recklessness, training in harmless hilarity
and social enjoyment as against mere vulgar excitement and rag-time
pleasures, training in respect for law as against living under
hysterical rules which cannot be executed and which invite blackmail,
corruption, and habitual disregard of laws--these are indeed the most
needed influences on the social mind of the country.