The fundamental objection to prohibition, as it stands, lies in the cold fact that provincialism, no matter how sincere, can never compete with international common sense and cosmopolitan culture.
Village residents are ignorant of the laws that govern society in the most intelligent centers of the world. What will be the result in the long run? Antagonism between the people of the cities and the people of the country.
When they prohibit tobacco, a war of cuss words will be followed by a battle of cuspidors, and the very crows will cuss the crocuses.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Some Members of Parliament have lost their reason, the majority have lost their wits, all are without vision.
Lloyd George presents the curious spectacle of a man of the people who observes them through the glasses of a Welsh Calvinist. He is a democrat with the demeanor of a lord, a radical who has fallen between the two stools of the middle-class and the landed aristocracy. Nonconformist sentimentality, on one hand, and titled wealth on the other, have blinded him to the imperative needs of the time and the dangers that confront the Empire.
The English people of the past twenty years have suffered as much from misgovernment as the Germans and the Russians, but they cannot stop the present stream of progress by clatter in the House and appeals to patriotism.
For years England has been saddled with cabinets composed of professional humorists and hum-drum moralists.