NO REMEDY BUT PROHIBITION.
Is there any other means of cure for national drunkenness? The remedy of license has been found as valueless for the whole people as restriction for the individual. Appetite, when once depraved, becomes, in the individual, lawless, exacting and unscrupulous; not hesitating to trample on duty, justice, humanity and every public and private virtue. It will keep no faith; it will hold to no pledge, however solemnly taken. It must be wholly denied or it will be wholly master.
As in the individual, so in the nation, State or community. Appetite loses nothing by aggregation; nor are the laws of its action changed. If not denied by prohibition in the State, as by total abstinence in the individual, it will continue to entail upon the people loss and ruin and unutterable woes. License, restrictive permission, tax, all will be vain in the future as they have been in the past. There is no hope, no help, no refuge in anything but Prohibition!
And here we art met by two questions, fairly and honestly asked. First. Is prohibition right in the abstract as a legislative measure? Second. Can prohibitory laws be enforced, and will they cure the evil of drunkenness?
First, as to the question of legislative action. Can the State forbid the sale of intoxicating drinks as a beverage without violating the natural right of certain citizens, engaged in the manufacture and sale of these articles, to supply them to customers who wish to purchase?
We answer, that no man has a natural right to do wrong; that is, to engage in any pursuit by which he makes gain out of loss and injury to his neighbor. The essential principle of government is the well-being of the people. It guarantees to the weak, security against the strong; it punishes evil doers, and seeks to protect its citizens from the evil effects of that unscrupulous selfishness in the individual which would trample on the rights of all the rest in its pursuit of money or power.
Now, if it can be shown that the liquor traffic is a good thing; that it benefits the people; makes them more prosperous and happy; improves their health; promotes education and encourages virtue, then its right to exist in the community has been established. Or, even if the good claimed for it be only negative instead, of positive, its right must still be unquestioned. But what if it works evil and only evil in the State? What if it blights and curses every neighborhood, and town, and city, and nation in which it exists; laying heavy taxes upon the people that it may live and flourish, crippling all industries; corrupting the morals of the people; enticing the young from virtue; filling jails, and poor-houses, and asylums with a great army of criminals, paupers and insane men and women, yearly extinguishing the light in thousands of happy homes? What then?
Does this fruit of the liquor traffic establish its right to existence and to the protection of law? Let the reader answer the question for himself. That it entails all of these evils, and many more, upon the community, cannot and will not be denied. That it does any good, cannot be shown. Fairly, then, it has no right to existence in any government established for the good of the people; and in suppressing it, no wrong can be done.