The Menace of Prohibition

BY LULU WIGHTMAN

“No man in America has any right to rest contented and easy and indifferent, for never before, not even in the time of the Civil War, have all the energies and all the devotion of the American democracy been demanded for the perpetuity of American institutions, for the continuance of the American republic against foes without and more insidious foes within than in the year of grace 1916.”

—Hon. Elihu Root, in address before the New York State Bar Association, Hotel Astor, New York, January 15th, 1916.

PREFACE

Most writers, in viewing the question of Prohibition, have followed along a beaten track. They have confined themselves generally to consideration of moral, economic, and religious phases of the subject.

While I have not entirely ignored these phases, I have chiefly engaged in the task of pointing out a particular phase that it appears to me entirely outweighs all others put together; namely, that of the effect of Prohibition, in its ultimate and practical workings, upon the political—the structure of American civil government.