There is always a reaction against enforced goodness—against enforced anything. But no sour-visaged sarsaparilla drinker ever realizes that. He puts over his “reform” and imagines that all is well. He cannot hear the shuffling of feet, the movement of armies in the dim distance. If he does, he mistakes it for applause.
The fact that Americans were taking care of themselves, so far as the drink question was concerned, makes the sudden appearance of the fanatics all the more non-understandable. They came upon us with gusto. They are pathological—any doctor will tell you that. And the American people, who believe, I am told, in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, permit themselves to be governed by a pack of pathological cases who, themselves, should be in wards, if not in padded cells.
And they are not content with this initial victory. As the Irishman put it, “If this is Prohibition, why didn’t we have it long ago?” And a visiting Englishman exclaimed, looking our country over, “Prohibition?—When does it start?”
They are going after our tobacco, our golf and motoring on the Sabbath; and they are going to dip into our cellars and rob us of that which we used to keep there, oh, so seldom, but now have in great and wise abundance.
It never occurred to any of us in the old, halcyon days when one could loll on the back platform of a horse-car or trolley with the glorious multitude, and smoke there, to keep a supply of liquor in our homes. If we were giving a dinner, and wished to oil the social wheels just a bit to start the machine going, we may have sent to the corner and bought a bottle of gin and a little vermouth, and perhaps a quart of simple California claret, and let it go at that. No one disgraced himself. It was all very quiet and serene and sane and nice. We hurt no one; we did ourselves no injury (any physician will tell you that; he needs whiskey in his practice, if he is the right kind of physician), and a pleasant time was had by all, as the country newspapers say.
But from that undramatic drinking what, because of Mr. Longface, have we leaped to? To the hip-flask, the sly treating in coat-rooms—and other places I need hardly mention—long before dinner begins, so that one may be sure of a sensation which no decent man should care to experience.
A nervous tension is in the air, putting us all back twenty years. I assure the reader that never once in my life did I carry a flask of brandy, even when I was going on a long and dusty and tedious journey; yet my dear mother was as certain that I should take one as that I should wear rubbers when it rained; and I let her believe I did both, for the sake of her peace of mind.
Was my mother a criminal, for her quiet advice? Not then; but she would be considered so now, with Mr. Volstead’s act on the records of my beloved land. Actually, I am a criminal if I take a sip outside my home—in my club, in my travels. If I transport a little of that whimsical stuff of which poets have sung so beautifully and often, I can be dragged to jail—if I am caught. Boo! What a mockery of personal freedom it all is!
I heard a fine citizen say not long ago—a man of wealth and position, a publicist, a man of affairs (I am using the word in its proper sense!), a man who loved, very definitely, the great America that used to be—that for the first time in his life he had the despicable thought that he would like to withhold something, if he could, on his income tax. He felt little compunction for the base thought. Why should he hand his hard-earned money over to a Government which deprived him of so much of his personal liberty and held over his head the dire threat of further deprivations?
What was this man getting out of America? he asked me. Just a dull time, to be truthful. He was but one more waffle from the great national waffle-iron. When he wanted diversion he must pack up and fare to other lands, where living is still living, crave a passport, swear that he had paid last year’s tax, produce a receipt he had never received, and promise to pay this year’s, and either not stay away too long or see to it that his lawyer attended to it for him.