Although the full effect of the evil has been postponed to our own day, nevertheless the indictment against modern industrialism is not new. Scarcely had the so-called “industrial revolution” ushered in the superlative degree of the evil spreading outward from the Protestant societies dominant in our world before the seamy side of the business was shown up. In nineteenth century England (the parent and, until yesterday, the centre of the system) industrialism was ably attacked by such men as Dickens, Ruskin, and William Morris. Still the protests were not effective in that, despite them, complacency remained the typical mood of the Victorian Age. The resulting destructive political movements and the strikes were already drearily familiar before 1900. Protestantism, in breaking down the corporate religious ties which made men members one of another, had released destructive forces in human nature which were beyond control. Incidentally, the action of these forces was precisely contrary to the “economic” intentions present in the mind of so many early Protestants! Before 1914 it was apparent that matters were becoming serious, and now the strain of the Great War has so increased the industrial friction inherent in our society that such friction has become the chief problem confronting civilization.
Although the pressing nature of the problem of our chronic industrial civil war is now abundantly recognized, the nature of the problem itself is still incorrectly diagnosed. The “industrial revolution” is generally given as the root of the trouble, whereas the industrial revolution merely watered the evil seed sown broadcast by the sixteenth century moral change in Europe. So, also, the Prohibition movement is not seen in its true bearings as a result of the continuing activity of precisely the same spirit which brought about the sixteenth century moral change—that is, the alliance between a narrow religious fanaticism on the one hand and the avarice of the merchant and “captain of industry” on the other. The adoption of the American Prohibition amendment coincided closely in time with the close of the Great War which has brought industrial strife to a head. To those sufficiently instructed to know Prohibition and industrial strife as alike children of the Protestant spirit, the coincidence is a symbol and a warning.
To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority. Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man. Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens the Christian world to-day. In the countries where the great landlords and the mercantile classes, working under cover of the narrow enthusiasm of the fanatics, won their great sixteenth century triumph (that is in England, Holland and the Northern Germanies) that triumph resulted in the confiscation of Church property by the State and its prompt absorption, not by the mass of the people as in France after the Revolution, but by the aforesaid great landholders and merchants themselves. With the increased influence due to this addition to their wealth, they were able gradually to dispossess the yeoman farmers and, in trade and industry, to substitute unrestricted competition in place of the guild system; but the strain which would otherwise have been promptly felt in the Protestant societies was relieved, as we have seen, by the great age of expansion. When the new discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about in England the industrial revolution, that revolution took place in a society in which the mass of the people had already forgotten their old economic freedom. Already they were accustomed to see their economic life dominated by merchants and landlords (over whom they had no check) acknowledging no definite moral authority whatsoever. In the two hundred years since the process had begun, it had come to seem natural that a few should control the means of production, and that these few, the rich, should look upon poor men mainly as instruments for their own further private enrichment. It was because of the destructive sixteenth century moral change and in no way because of any quality inherent in the new machines that the discovery of these last has made so enormously for unhappiness and strife. It is true that the machines have enormously accelerated the long process which has already reduced the wage-earner from the Christian liberty his ancestors enjoyed to something very like serfdom. But the essential point to be grasped is that the machines have only accelerated the process, they did not bring it about and they have not changed its nature.
In all this, the Prohibition movement has been an integral part. Prohibition has its roots in the great sixteenth century victories of fanaticism plus greed. It appeared above ground because of conditions brought about by discoveries in physical science acting upon a society coloured by the Protestant victories, although in themselves these discoveries have no inherent connection with morals. It has won a great victory in America and is attempting to invade England at the present day, when the strain of chronic industrial war has become acute and world-wide.
The historical connection between Protestantism and Prohibition has been but little studied. Nevertheless its outlines are abundantly clear. Prohibition was not among the original Protestant taboos. Even the Puritans and, as far as is known, the Anabaptists (who together made up the “extreme left” among the sixteenth century sects) were not prepared to abandon Christian tradition so completely as to hold fermented drinks to be sinful. But Protestantism par excellence, that is Puritanism (from its original belief that worship was only possible through the mind and never through the senses), began by divorcing religion from beauty, and went on to a hatred of the decorative side of life and especially of the simple pleasures of the populace.
The Protestant societies created modern industrialism with its masses of degraded proletarians. As discoveries in physical science intensified the evils of industrialism in general (although they did not create those evils), so in the particular case of drink the commercial distillation of “hard” liquor still further magnified the evil of intemperance. The sequence is clear in both the general and the particular case. Even in the sixteenth century, Protestantism had already produced proletarians and public drunkenness on so large a scale that the first laws against drunkenness are found under Edward VI, and under Elizabeth the first Poor Law establishing workhouses. Until Edward and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had abolished the monasteries, which supplemented the guilds in what we should call “social work,” it had not been found necessary to build workhouses for the poor nor to jail poor men who got drunk. Certainly it is clear that want, and drunkenness as the habitual result of want, were on the increase. And yet hard liquor was not plentiful in England until the very end of the seventeenth century. A few whisky distilleries had been set up in England in Henry VIII’s time but beer had continued to be the daily drink of Englishmen, and wine that of English gentlemen.
It was not until 1689, when the Government abolished all restrictions upon gin-distilling, that hard liquor became plentiful in England, and then it became plentiful with a vengeance; the proletarianizing process had been going on for over a hundred years. To complete the sequence of Protestantism, proletarianism and hard liquor, came the doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of drink. This seems to have been first preached by the eighteenth century Methodists, who appear as a distinct schism from the Church of England in 1740. Thirty years later their teaching was familiar enough to be noticed in the theatre. In a drinking song in the first act of Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer,” first played in 1773, we find the following lines:—
“When methodist preachers come down,
A-preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown