It is true that the chief points of this national doctrine are that men have certain inherent, natural rights ... predominantly the right to “liberty,” that they are equal in those rights, and in all other matters touching the law. Obviously this implies for instance that no citizen or group of citizens should be empowered to compel their fellows either to consume or to refrain from any given sort of food or drink.
On the other hand, the reverence paid to the written law, founded upon the Declaration and the Constitution, has resulted in widespread error as to the nature of law itself. The majestic formulas of the Declaration, and the governmental framework set forth in the Constitution, changed in no way the manners and customs of Americans. Their power was derived from the response which they roused in the rooted instinct of men of European stock. The underlying spirit of Christendom breathed life into them. Unhappily the mass of Americans, cut off as they were from tradition—first by their Protestantism and secondly by the Atlantic—instead of recognizing the traditional source from which the strength of their national formula was derived, mistakenly believed that strength to be derived from the fact that these formulas had been made the basis of American statute law. Instead of recognizing in statute law merely the ratification of established custom resulting from the sum of human activities, they erroneously came to believe that human activities could be compelled to conform to statutes merely because these statutes were proclaimed to have the force of law, and irrespective of the fundamental laws of human nature and inexorable human limitations which underlay those activities. “Men do not make the laws. They do but discover them,”[45] says Vice-President Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. And in so saying he indicts one of the great failures of American thought.
Having thus considered the real forces making for Prohibition, it remains for us merely to mention some of the more prevalent bits of claptrap which formed the stock-in-trade of Prohibition advocates. There were such statements as that the “wine” at the marriage in Cana of Galilee was unfermented! When the present writer was serving a term in the New York State Legislature, this was solemnly urged upon him by a Prohibition lobbyist. The imaginary picture of the ancient Jews, and of our Blessed Lord, fiddling about with benzoate of soda or some such stuff needs no comment. There was pseudo-scientific gibberish on the subject of “alcohol”; it was sought to show that it was a poison. The comforting thought was at once suggested that it must be a very slow poison, inasmuch as all our ancestors for countless generations had daily consumed fermented liquors containing appreciable amounts of it. The argument was on all fours with the vegetarian claims as to meat being poison. It was also sought to show that “alcohol” was incompatible with work; the same might have been said of sleep. There was a crop of wild statements having to do with the “working man,” considering him not as a fellow creature of like passions with ourselves but as a strange monster transmogrified by the middle-class imagination. It was alleged that “drink” caused the creature to beat his wife even upon occasions when she deserved nothing of the sort. It was claimed that when the “working man” was deprived of his chief recreation (which was admitted to be “drink”) the result would be increased prosperity and good temper in his family circle. The slightest acquaintance with Mohammedan countries would have been sufficient to disprove such stuff. These “working man” fantasies are eloquent testimony to the barrier built up between the classes of the community by centuries of Protestantism. Together with the rest of the Prohibition claptrap, they deserve to be recorded in triple brass in order to be the laughter, or the pity, of generations to come.
Our generation has made a fine art of anonymity and the use of “dummies” in finance. Therefore it is impossible at this time, and will probably remain impossible, to expose the true sources from which the twentieth century puritans got their propaganda fund. It is common knowledge that many, if not most, of the large employers of “labour” sympathized with the Puritan cause ... as in the sixteenth century. It is believed that the Rockefellers gave enormously, and the fact that they are the most prominent Baptist laymen in the country, if not in the world, makes the belief seem probable.
The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has not ended the Prohibition movement in America. So far, the task of enforcement has proved impossible. Probably there has been some appreciable reduction in the amount of fermented and distilled liquors consumed. Certainly the price of liquor has increased and its quality has deteriorated. No man can foretell the future: prophets are the jesters of posterity. Given the extreme difficulty of repealing a constitutional amendment (repeal would require a majority of two-thirds in the United States Senate, and again in the Federal House of Representatives, and after that a favourable vote in both branches of the legislature in three-fourths of the States) it seems probable that the Eighteenth Amendment will remain upon the statute books at least for a considerable time. However, there is already one amendment, the fifteenth, intended to secure the franchise to the negroes of the South, which slumbers on the statute books. At present, the Prohibition Amendment is a farce throughout many populous States, and the burdened taxpayer is loaded with the salaries of enforcement officials. The position of these enforcement officials somewhat resembles that of the Viking pirates of the ninth century. They have an enormous territory which they can raid almost at will, and throughout which they can annoy the inhabitants. But they are so few that, even with the enormous powers of movement and communication at the disposal of a modern Government, they are unable to constrain the activities of the millions among whom they operate. Like the old pirates again, these officials can frequently be bribed into harmlessness. Meanwhile, it is still possible to believe, if anyone desires to do so, that the immemorial traditions of Christendom will yield to a written law backed up by a handful of officials.
The spectacle is of absorbing interest to the student of history, who personifies the memory of the race. In his more sanguine moods he sees the gently sloping vineyards by Loire, he hears Rabelais roaring with laughter from his deep lungs, and he looks forward to a happy confounding of fools. Again he feels an antique paganism settle down upon him like a grey mist, and he remembers the vengeance of the Gods as Euripides has told it in the “Hippolytus” and, above all, in the “Bacchæ.” For the student of history knows that the forces of our human nature, which the ancients personified as Gods, are immortal. Man may persecute but cannot kill them, and under his persecution they become demons who turn and rend him, as Savonarola and the old English Puritans found. Even St. Francis’ death-bed was darkened a little by his memory of his own austerities. “I have sinned,” he said, “against my brother the ass.” And what were the voluntary sufferings of a monk or of all monks put together, as sins against “the Gods” of life, compared with the deliberate, forcible, attempt to teetotalize a whole nation?
As an assault upon human liberty, what was even the Inquisition compared to the American Anti-saloon League?
In closing, let us recapitulate the points of resemblance and of divergence between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. Both were religious in their essence; the Protestant denomination made the second, just as certainly as the thirteenth century Catholic Church made the first. Both movements, being religious, were based upon beliefs transcending the human reason. In the case of the Inquisition the belief in question was the Catholic Faith; in the case of Prohibition it is belief in the innate sinfulness of distilled and fermented drinks. Both movements had a secular as well as their dominant religious side. A thirteenth century man careless of The Faith, even an infidel in personal belief, might have cordially approved of severities against heretics, because of the social dispeace which the presence of avowed heretics tended to cause. The infidel emperor Frederic II, with his drastic Inquisitorial legislation, is a case in point. Just so, it is possible for a man to be a sincere Prohibitionist, on account of some idea of the harmfulness of “drink” to the generality of mankind, especially to the “workingman,” although he regards its use by himself as beneficent. Indeed the tiny minority of Prohibitionists who believe themselves to be well educated are usually of this sort. Finally, as the Inquisition appears to be contrary to the spirit of Our Lord’s teaching, so the Prohibition movement is certainly contrary to His practice, at the marriage of Cana, at the Last Supper, and generally throughout his life.
On the other hand, in spite of so much resemblance, there are important differences between the Inquisitor and the Prohibitionist. In the first place, there is a profound difference as to intellectual integrity and candor. Catholic faith and morals were, and are, definite. From the time when the Church emerges into the full light of abundant historical record, in the first years of the third century, she has regarded their definition as one of her chief functions. Her corporate tradition declares that such was the case from her beginning, and the documents which survive from the first two centuries cannot, to say the very least, be made to contradict this conclusion. Protestantism, on the other hand, was from the first a revolt against authoritative corporate definition. From the sixteenth century to the present time its theological and ethical vagueness has increased until a climax, it would seem, has been reached in the matter of Prohibition.
No clear statement of the Prohibitionist credo has ever been made and endorsed by even a majority of those engaged in the movement. An attempt has been made to say that “temperance” involves moderation in the use of that which is good and total abstinence from that which is harmful. But this attempt fails in two respects, inasmuch as it confuses temperance with the purely secular virtue of prudence which is nothing to a man’s salvation and therefore no possible part of the moral teaching of any Christian body, and inasmuch as it obviously conflicts with the corporate experience of mankind in calling the moderate use of fermented drinks “harmful.”