The Prohibitionists, good souls, are funny. They are all “down upon”
license—high or low—because it is a legal “recognition” of the liquor
trade. As reasonably they might condemn fines for misdemeanor as legal
recognition of misdemeanor. Until the liquor trade is forbidden it
is legally recognized, whether licensed or not. Why can not militant
aquarians accustom themselves to think of a license fee as an _ante
facto_ fine? I am not loaded down with controversial weapons for the
fray between liquor and water; I love neither the one liquid nor the
other; but I enjoy the quarrels of others, am enamored of effective
means in battle and should be miserable if I had failed to point out to
any combatant in any contention how he could obtain an honest advantage.
Do I not drink water? Yes, a little—when instigated by thirst. Does
any one drink it under any other circumstances? Does any one drink it
because he likes it?—or rather, does any one like it when not suffering
from a disagreeable disorder? We take water as medicine for the disease
thirst. It is to be considered as a remedial agent—but so vilely
compounded in nature’s laboratory and so distasteful to the normal
palate that the world in all ages has been virtually united in avoiding
it. Nothing has so stimulated human ingenuity and invited such constant
investments as the discovery, invention and manufacture of palatable
substitutes for plain water; and nothing could be more unphilosophical
than to attribute this universal movement to perversity or caprice.
Extravagant as are some of its manifestations, deplorable as are some
of its consequences, at the back of it all, as at the back of every
wide and persistent trend of human activity, is some imperious and
unsleeping necessity.
Consider, if you will be so good, what “drinking-water” actually is. It
is the world’s sewage. It is what that dirty boy, the earth, has washed
his face with. The wells, rivers and rills are nature’s slop-buckets,
and the lowland springs are not much better; all soluble substances
on or near the surface of the earth eventually get into them. Melted
mountain snow is pure enough, but by the time it reaches the lip of the
flatlander it is a solution of abomination. It is macerated man. It is
hydrate of dead dog with an infusion of all that is untidy—infested
with germs of nameless plagues, carrying ferocious anthropophagi and
loaded with mordant minerals. By many scientists it is held that age
is simply a disease caused, mainly, by cumulative deposits of lime and
other inorganic matter in the organs of the body, most of them taken in
water. If our drink were free of minerals and depeopled of its little
reptiles it is probable that we might live a thousand years and die of
the minerals and reptiles in our food—those of us who are not shot or
hanged.
The protagonists of water tell us that it is the natural drink of man.
We drink it for economy, from ignorance or inattention, from hereditary
habit bequeathed to us by barbarian ancestors who had nothing else
and knew not the sacred grape. They ate beetles, too, stale fish and
one another. Were these the natural food of man? Man has no natural
food and drink; he takes what he can get. An infant race is like an
infant individual: whatever it can lay its hands on goes into its
dauby mouth. Water, _pure_ water, has one merit—it is cheap; and one
disadvantage—it is not good.
Mr. Prohibitionist would like to deprive me of wine by law; not because
that would make me happier: it would make _him_ happier. As long as
I cannot prevent him from trying, I fancy that I don’t wish to, and
execute a multitude of fine sentiments about the virtue of tolerance
and the advantages of free speech. But give me the power, and the first
time I catch him rolling his rebuking eye at my wineglass I will fill
up his well.