PROHIBITION AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
BY
HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
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, 439 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 clientèle—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. 440 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 441 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 442 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; 443 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 444 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.