What Prohibition Has Done to America

by Fabian Franklin

Liberty is not to-day the watchword that it was a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, or thirty years ago. Though there may be much doubt as to the causes of the change, it must be admitted as a fact that the feeling that liberty is in itself one of the prime objects of human desire, a precious thing to be struggled for when denied and to be jealously defended when possessed, has not so strong a hold on men's minds at this time as it had in former generations.

Some of the chief reasons for this change are not, however, far to seek. In the tremendous movement, political and economic, that has marked the past hundred years, three ideas have been dominant--democracy, efficiency, humanitarianism. None of these three ideas is inherently bound up with the idea of liberty; and indeed each one of the three contains the seed of marked hostility to the idea of liberty. This is more true, and more obviously true, of efficiency and of humanitarianism than it is of democracy; but it is true in no small measure of democracy also. For people intent upon the idea that government must be democratic that is, must reflect the will of the majority naturally concentrate upon the effort to organize the majority and increase its power; a process which throws into the shade regard for individual rights and liberties, and even tends to put them somewhat in the light of obstacles to the great aim. Furthermore, the democratic movement has set for itself objects beyond the sphere of government; and in the domain of economic control, democracy if that is the right word for it must strive for collective power, as distinguished from individual liberty, even more intently than in the field of government.

However, in the case of democracy, there is at least no _inherent opposition_ to liberty; such opposition as develops out of it may be regarded as comparatively accidental. Not so with efficiency or humanitarianism. Even here, however, I feel that a word of warning is necessary. I am not speaking of the highest and truest efficiency, or of the most far-sighted and most beneficent humanitarianism. I am speaking of efficiency as understood in the common use of the term as a label; and I am speaking of humanitarianism as represented by the attitude and the mental temper of nearly all of the excellent men and women who actually represent that cause and who devote their lives to the problems of social betterment.

To the efficiency expert and to his multitude of followers, the immediate increase of productivity is so absorbing an object that if it has been attained by a particular course of action, the question whether its attainment has involved a sacrifice of liberty seems to his mind absolutely trivial. Of course this would not be so if the sacrifice were of a startling nature; but short of something palpably galling, something grossly offensive to the primary instincts of freemen, he simply doesn't understand how any person of sense can pretend to be concerned about it, in the face of demonstrated success from the efficiency standpoint.

What is true of the apostle of efficiency, and his followers, is even more emphatically true of the humanitarian. And, difficult as many people find it to stand out against the position of the efficiency advocate, it is far more difficult to dissent from that of the devotee of humanitarianism. In the case of the first, one has to brace up one's intellect to resist a plausible and enticing doctrine; in the case of the second, one must, in a sense, harden one's heart as well as stiffen one's mind. For here one has to deal not with a mere calculation of a general increase of prosperity or comfort, but with the direct extirpation of vice and misery which no decent person can contemplate without keen distress. If the humanitarian finds the principle of liberty thrust in the way of his task of healing and rescue, he will repel with scorn the idea that any such abstraction should be permitted to impede his work of salvation; and especially if the idea of liberty has, through other causes, suffered a decline from its once high authority he will find multitudes ready to share his indignation. And he will find still greater multitudes who do not share his indignation, and in their hearts feel much misgiving over the invasion of liberty, but who are without the firmness of conviction, or without the moral courage, necessary to the assertion of principle when such assertion brings with it the danger of social opprobrium. The leaders in humanitarian reforms, and their most active followers, are, as a rule, men and women of high moral nature, and whether wise or unwise, broad-minded or narrow and fanatical, are justly credited with being actuated by a good motive; unfortunately, however, these attributes rarely prevent them from making reckless statements as to the facts of the matter with which they are dealing, nor from indulging in calumnious abuse of those who oppose them. Hence thousands of persons really averse to their programme give tacit or lukewarm assent to it rather than incur the odium which outspoken opposition would invite; and accordingly, true though it is that the idea of liberty is not cherished so ardently or so universally as in a former day, the decline into which it has fallen in men's hearts and minds is by no means so great as surface indications make it seem. On the one hand, the efficiency people and the professional humanitarians are, like all reformers and agitators, abnormally vocal; and on the other hand the lovers of the old-fashioned principle of liberty are abnormally silent, so far as any public manifestation is concerned.

In the foregoing I have admitted, I think, as great a decline in the current prestige of the idea of liberty as would be claimed by the most enthusiastic efficiency man or the most ardent humanitarian. I now wish to insist upon the other side of the matter. Persons who are always ready to be carried away with the current--and their name is legion--constantly make the mistake of imagining that the latest thing is the last. They are the first to throw aside old and venerable notions as outworn; they look with condescending pity upon those who are so dull as not to recognize the infinite potency of change; and yet, curiously enough, they never think of the possibility of a change which may reverse the current of to-day just as the current of to-day has reversed that of yesterday. The tree of liberty is less flourishing to-day than it was fifty or a hundred years ago; its leaves are not so green, and it is not so much the object of universal admiration and affection. But its roots are deep down in the soil; and it supplies a need of mankind too fundamental, feeds an aspiration too closely linked with all that elevates and enriches human nature, to permit of its being permanently neglected or allowed to fall into decay.

And even at this very time, as I have indicated above, the mass of the people and I mean great as well as small, cultured and wealthy as well as ignorant and poor retain their instinctive attachment to the idea of liberty. It is chiefly in a small, but extremely prominent and influential, body of over-sophisticated people--specialists of one kind or another--that the principle of liberty has fallen into the disrepute to which I have referred. The prime reason why the Prohibition law is so light-heartedly violated by all sorts and conditions of men, why it is held in contempt by hundreds of thousands of our best and most respected citizens, is that the law is a gross outrage upon personal liberty. Many, indeed, would commit the violation as a mere matter of self-indulgence; but it is absurd to suppose that this would be done, as it is done, by thousands of persons of the highest type of character and citizenship. These people are sustained by the consciousness that, though their conduct may be open to criticism, it at least has the justification of being a revolt against a law--a law unrepealable by any ordinary process--that strikes at the foundations of liberty.

Defenders of Prohibition seek to do away with the objection to it as an invasion of personal liberty by pointing out that all submission to civil government is in the nature of a surrender of personal liberty. This is true enough, but only a shallow mind can be content with this cheap and easy disposition of the question. To any one who stops to think of the subject with some intelligence it must be evident that the argument proves either too much or nothing at all. If it means that no proposed restriction can properly be objected to as an invasion of personal liberty, because all restrictions are on the same footing as part of the order of society, it means what every man of sense would at once declare to be preposterous; and if it does not mean that it leaves the question at issue wholly untouched.

Submission to an orderly government does, of course, involve the surrender of one's personal freedom in countless directions. But speaking broadly, such surrender is exacted, under what are generally known as "free institutions," only to the extent to which the right of one man to do as he pleases has to be restricted in order to secure the elementary rights of other men from violation, or to preserve conditions that are essential to the general welfare. If A steals, he steals from B; if he murders, he kills B; if he commits arson, he sets fire to B's house. If a man makes a loud noise in the street, he disturbs the quiet of hundreds of his fellow citizens, and may make life quite unendurable to them. There are complexities into which I cannot enter in such matters as Sunday closing and kindred regulations; but upon examination it is easily enough seen that they fall in essence under the same principle--the principle of restraint upon one individual to prevent him from injuring not himself, but others.

A law punishing drunkenness, which is a public nuisance, comes under the head I have been speaking of; a law forbidding a man to drink for fear that he may become a drunkard does not. And in fact the prohibitionists themselves instinctively recognize the difference, and avoid, so far as they can, offending the sense of liberty by so direct an attack upon it. It is safe to say that if the Eighteenth Amendment had undertaken to make the _drinking_ of liquor a crime, instead of the _manufacture and sale_ of it, it could not have been passed or come anywhere near being passed. There is hardly a Senator or a Representative that would not have recoiled from a proposal so palpably offensive to the instinct of liberty. Yet precisely this is the real object of the Eighteenth Amendment; its purpose and, if enforced, its practical effect is to make it permanently a crime against the national government for an American to drink a glass of beer or wine. The legislators, State and national, who enacted it knew this perfectly well; yet if the thing had been put into the Amendment in so many words, hardly a man of them would have cast his vote for it. The phenomenon is not so strange, or so novel, as it might seem; it has a standard prototype in the history of Rome. The Roman people had a rooted aversion and hostility to kings; and no Caesar would ever have thought of calling himself _rex_. But _imperator_ went down quite smoothly, and did just as well.