_Question_. How much importance do you attach to the present
prohibition movement?
_Answer_. No particular importance. I am opposed to prohibition
and always have been, and hope always to be. I do not want the
Legislature to interfere in these matters. I do not believe that
the people can be made temperate by law. Men and women are not
made great and good by the law. There is no good in the world that
cannot be abused. Prohibition fills the world with spies and
tattlers, and, besides that, where a majority of the people are
not in favor of it the law will not be enforced; and where a majority
of the people are in favor of it there is not much need of the law.
Where a majority are against it, juries will violate their oath,
and witnesses will get around the truth, and the result is
demoralization. Take wine and malt liquors out of the world and
we shall lose a vast deal of good fellowship; the world would lose
more than it would gain. There is a certain sociability about wine
that I should hate to have taken from the earth. Strong liquors
the folks had better let alone. If prohibition succeeds, and wines
and malt liquors go, the next thing will be to take tobacco away,
and the next thing all other pleasures, until prayer meetings will
be the only places of enjoyment.
_Question_. Do you care to say who your choice is for Republican
nominee for President in 1888?
_Answer_. I now promise that I will answer this question either
in May or June, 1888. At present my choice is not fixed, and is
liable to change at any moment, and I need to leave it free, so
that it can change from time to time as the circumstances change.
I will, however, tell you privately that I think it will probably
be a new man, somebody on whom the Republicans can unite. I have
made a good many inquiries myself to find out who this man is to
be, but in every instance the answer has been determined by the
location in which the gentleman lived who gave the answer. Let us
wait.
_Question_. Do you think the Republican party should take a decided
stand on the temperance issue?
_Answer_. I do; and that decided stand should be that temperance
is an individual question, something with which the State and Nation
have nothing to do. Temperance is a thing that the law cannot
control. You might as well try to control music, painting, sculpture,
or metaphysics, as the question of temperance. As life becomes
more valuable, people will learn to take better care of it. There
is something more to be desired even than temperance, and that is
liberty. I do not believe in putting out the sun because weeds
grow. I should rather have some weeds than go without wheat and
corn. The Republican party should represent liberty and individuality;
it should keep abreast of the real spirit of the age; the Republican
party ought to be intelligent enough to know that progress has been
marked not by the enactment of new laws, but by the repeal of old
ones.
--_Evening Traveler_, Boston, October, 1886.