And there are not even any swinging-doors to hide the sundae fiends. Shamelessly they imbibe their drinks with the world passing the unshaded windows, looking in at them. A shocking state of affairs. Yet who is doing anything about it? No wonder little Alice, of the pale face, does not eat much luncheon. Her mother worries over her anemic condition; yet she will not take the time to investigate the child’s daily habits. She never inquires how she spends her allowance. And young Bobby, who formerly was so rosy and plump, deteriorates into a consumptive-looking boy. No, he doesn’t smoke; and as yet he has not acquired the hip-flask habit. What, then, is the matter with him, that he drops out of baseball and has no heart for tennis; that he is backward in his studies, and sleeps restlessly? On his way to school he stops in at the soda-fountain. And on his way home, he stops in once more. Surely the Government should issue cards, and make it a misdemeanor for a clerk to serve more than one soda a week to minors—and grown-ups. The Board of Health should do something about it.
You see, if it isn’t one thing it’s another in this troubled world. No sooner do we mop up the saloon than we find other places in need of mopping. Parents and social workers, here is a job for you. Get at it, at once. Forthwith. Instanter. Immediately. The future welfare of the race is at stake.
If it were only ginger-pop that the children drank! But here again one cannot control the appetites of human beings. We have closed the corner saloon. Is there no way of closing the corner soda-fountain?
It is curious, in these days when there is so much understanding, even among flappers, of psycho-analysis and complexes, that no one seems to have called attention to the fact that the prohibitionists are the greatest living examples of certain distressing inhibitions.
That the majority of us should find ourselves suddenly dictated to—told, literally, what we should and should not put into our own little private tummies—is beyond belief. What does a man who has never taken a drink know of the psychology of drink? What does he know of good-fellowship, of the poetry of the toast, of the beauties of Brüderschaft? I would as soon think of Dr. Mary Walker telling Romeo and Juliet how to make love.
The set lips of the fanatical reformer are the outward evidence of an interior set of corroding inhibitions. Unable to get relief from the tedium of existence in, say, a town like Gopher Prairie, the subject moves, in his or her later years, to Minneapolis or some other larger city, and is next heard of as a professional reformer of one sort or another.
I remember a young man in my class at school who was impossible as a playboy because he always wanted to rule the roost, to dictate everlastingly the manner in which any game we sought to enjoy should be played. He was never content to be just one of us. Oh, no! He must run things, order us about, be a dictator and a little czar, an autocrat of the most unbending kind. We despised him. He could never fall into line and be boyishly human. He could not yield; he could not adjust himself to the spirit of fun which we others abandoned ourselves to with youthful ease. He was just a common scold.
He disappeared from our school-yard, and from our lives. Years later, when the War broke out, he turned up in a remote town as a shrieking radical. Nothing was right. He had worked out his destiny in the only way such a nature as his could possibly do. He wasn’t a good sport. Worse, he wasn’t even a good citizen. He didn’t amount to a row of pins. He wasn’t even worth interning. He wasn’t interesting enough to get the slightest notoriety—he wasn’t what the newspapers term good copy; and that broke his heart.
I have no doubt that now, with the War over, he is a professional prohibitionist—or do I mean inhibitionist?—with a soft job at some desk. He would never be happy anywhere; but in such a position, interfering with normal people’s happiness, he would be as happy as he could be.
It is exactly men and women like him who have slipped over some of the laws we now have and who are planning statutes against staying away from church on Sunday. But it’s an old story. The intelligent people in every community are forever allowing themselves to be duped by fortune-tellers and ouija-board manipulators, table-tippers, snake doctors and bell-tinkling “mediums.”