We allow ticket speculators to buy up all the best places in our theaters, adding what profit they demand, and say nothing—though there is a statute forbidding such extortion. “Ah, we’re here for a good time, and we don’t care what it costs us,” is the answer of the average visitor to the metropolis when he is asked why he does not protest against such unjust measures. I have known only one rich man to refuse rooms at a fine hotel, simply because he felt it wrong to pay seventeen dollars a day, no matter what his bank balance. It is people like that who help the rest of us to a return to normal conditions. He thinks of someone but himself.
Yet we talk of Prohibition as though we were manfully trying to save the next generation from the perils of drink! We are doing nothing of the sort. We are merely bowing our craven heads to a mandate because we have neither the courage nor the energy to speak loudly against a stupid law foisted upon us by an organized minority. Our altruistic purpose is not apparent, for it never existed.
“Ah, but,” someone whispers, “the majority want this and that; so we must give in to them.”
Even so, why should we give in to them? The majority of people prefer flashy, meaningless movies and Pollyanna and Harold Bell Wright and chewing-gum and cheap jewelry and Gopher Prairie and slapstick humor and loud laughter and a crowded beach on Sunday, and hideous neckties and shirts and summer furs, and a hundred and one other things entirely foreign to my desires; why, then, should I walk in their path, jump over the hurdles that the multitude puts in front of me?
Arnold Bennett once said that the classics were kept alive, not by the man in the street, but by the passionate few. He was dead right. In the words of your beloved majority, he said a mouthful. Now, because my neighbor and my neighbor’s neighbor have a weakness for the best-sellers (not the best cellars), and find a robust pleasure in never thinking of anything beyond baseball, I do not see why I should be forced to indulge in a stupid Pollyanna optimism and forget and neglect my Keats and Shakespeare.
CHAPTER V
MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR DE-MOCKERY-CY
What psychological effect will this constant contempt for the law of the land have upon us as a people? Surely something dire and dreadful is seeping into the national spirit, and we are in grave danger of coming to a human dislike of all laws, in consequence.
We talk of Prohibition as a good thing for the generations to come; but how about disregard for the law as it will affect our children and our children’s children? Drunk, they might not be responsible; sober, to their higher selves they are accountable for their shortcomings in regard to our statutes. A lack of veneration for an orderly carrying out of a mandate is a serious thing. But to hear the young people talking these days about the sanctity of the Eighteenth Amendment is not a heartening experience. They jeer at it, and openly roar with laughter when it is mentioned.
No one wishes danger to overwhelm us; but it will, unless something is done to remedy the present abhorrent conditions, which, I repeat, are making most of us unhappy. We are entangled in too many legal nets; and it is not pleasing and edifying to see an ex-Judge or jurist who came out strong for Prohibition sitting night after night in a certain restaurant, imbibing his cocktail, creating scandal in a more than crowded room. He is not in his cups these days—only in his demi-tasses. I wonder if he knows what an example he sets to the flappers down the room, and with what derision his high-and-mighty public utterances are now greeted whenever he opens his mouth to speak between drinks?