The history of temperance reform is largely a story of vilification. Those
who have championed it have been steadily accused by the promoters of the
liquor industry. They have resorted to these things for the want of better
arguments. When mind reaches its limit it often abdicates in favor of
temper. Argument exhausted, the stores of abuse are open. The liquor
interests have drawn an utterly impossible picture of the temperance
reformer, and have tried to create in the public mind a complete
misconception of his purpose and motive.
The reform agitator may not always have fully appreciated the viewpoint of
the man on the other side of the question. It is certain that the latter
has seldom given much evidence of appreciating the position of the
agitator. Whether or not it has been intentional, most of the protests
coming from the liquor interests have originated in a misunderstanding of
the attitude of the people who are striving for a sober land.
This misunderstanding was unnecessary. It would also have been impossible
had really earnest and sincere thought been given the question. Thinking
is not always the order of the day, however, when either profit or
appetite is involved. There are still many people to whom life simply
means blind following of the crowd and meek obedience to the dictates of
superficial opinion. Comparatively few are accustomed to apply the keen
edge of reason to each proposition. Had more defenders of the saloon
cultivated this habit, the liquor problem would have perished of anaemia.
One of the cries raised in the rather recent past was that no sumptuary
legislation should be permitted. Political parties were in the habit of
writing into their platforms from year to year the statement that they
were opposed to all such enactment. This declaration seldom failed to
garner a harvest of votes from the self-styled liberal element.
It was cheap and easy to make such a declaration, but it would not have
been so easy to bolster it up with any reasonable defence. In the light
of deeper thought, such a position appears not only unreasonable and
ridiculous, but vicious and perilous as well.
Were one to search the criminal code from the beginning to the end he
could find no law which does not partake of the sumptuary nature. In one
way or another, each provision sets a limit for human liberty. Each tells
the citizen of a thing which he may not do and remain safe from the hand
of the law. It does not do so because society wants to prescribe the
rules of private conduct to be followed by any individual member. It does
so because it must protect its peaceful members against the trespasses of
those who do not regard the rights of others.
The law against burglary, for instance, is really a sumptuary measure. It
limits liberty at the point of taking the property of other people. No one
complains of the injustice of such a law. The menace of burglary, however,
does not compare with the menace which the saloon system has been.
The law which prevents one man from selling and another from buying
powerful narcotic and poisonous drugs is also a sumptuary provision. It
limits human liberty at the point of eating and drinking. Seldom does any
one complain about it. No other poison, however, has occupied so prominent
a place and wrought such widespread havoc as has alcohol.
The saloonkeeper has harmed society more than has the burglar. He should
therefore suffer at least an equal degree of restraint. Liquor has worked
more damage than has any other article of common sale. There is,
therefore, no reason why its manufacture and sale should not be affected
by at least the same safeguards as those surrounding the manufacture and
distribution of other dangerous drugs.
A kindred complaint from the liquor champions has been that the government
shows increasing signs of the spirit of paternalism. The contention is
that the prohibition reformer represents a meddlesome class who want to
control the lives of others. As is the case with the first claim
mentioned, this proposition needs but a second look. No proper government
and no thoughtful citizen desires the mere power to control the conduct
of other people. Especially have we tried to foster the spirit of freedom
in America. No one who loves his country wants unduly to destroy or
interfere with the liberty for which the nation stands.
The word freedom, however, must not suffer a wrong interpretation. Freedom
needs to recognize its own proper limits, and it will do so in any
properly organized social system. Such a measure as the prohibition of the
manufacture and sale of liquor is not paternalism. It is merely the
protection of the individual by the group.
The only freedom which any man, good or bad, can justly claim is the
freedom which ends at the point of injury to another. No one has any right
to deny such a measure of liberty to any man. No one has the right to
claim any measure of liberty beyond it.
The reformers so often accused of efforts at paternalism have really had
no thought of limiting the freedom of any one beyond this line of
democratic necessity. They have not been looking at the question from that
angle. They have been thinking neither of liberty nor of the lack of it.
Their consideration has not been so much the imagined rights of the
sinning as it has been the real rights of those sinned against. The limit
to freedom which prohibition implies is only one which should have been
set long ago by the reasonable thinking of amiable humanity. It is a
rather pitiful fact that it became necessary to have laws to do what the
rational conscience had failed to do.
The fact that the innocent have been protected against a man and that he
has been protected against himself gives him no right to insist that his
liberties have been unjustly curtailed. He has only been aided in the
interpretation of liberty in such a way as to be able to see that it
belongs to others as well as to himself.
Those who have braved the storm of misjudgment and abuse, so often the
portion of one who tries to be true to a great trust, did not seek the
destruction of any business nor the poverty of any class of men. The
thought which spurred them on was that of cheerless firesides, of hungry
stomachs, of shivering bodies, of dwarfed and neglected lives, and of the
threatened blight of a nation. It was not a question of paternalism.
It was one of protection.
When the nation has banished the saloon from its every nook and corner, as
it will soon do, no one can justly say that ours has become a
paternalistic government. Our government will simply have taken a forward
step in the fundamental task of any government—the service and protection
of its people.
When one finds another with a bottle of poison to his lips or with a gun
to his temple, no one calls him a meddler for striking the threatening
menace to the ground. In prohibition legislation, the national government
will only have stricken aside the weapon in time to preserve many a man
from destruction. Unborn generations will thus be saved from a curse
which has long hounded the human race.