Every year there are men who use knives to stab fellow-creatures; but there are millions who use their knives to eat their meals peacefully with. The law punishes the criminals, but would not think of forbidding the use of knives in orderly houses.
Any law is bad that punishes, injures, or annoys thousands of good, innocent people in order to stop the mischief done by a few—a very few, after all—blackguards and scoundrels.
The Anglo-Saxon should, by all means, preach temperance, which means moderation, not total abstinence. What they preach overreaches the mark, and does no good. When you say that a country enjoys a temperate climate, that does not mean that it has no climate at all, but enjoys a moderate one, neither too hot nor too cold.
These same Anglo-Saxons should not despise, but admire and envy, those who can enjoy, like men of understanding, like gentlemen, the glorious gifts of God to man without ever making fools of themselves. For these the law should be made.
If your husband or son, dear lady, would like to have a glass of wine or beer with his dinner, let him have it in your sweet and wholesome presence. Don't make a hypocrite of him. Don't compel him to go and hide himself in his club, or, worse, in a saloon, or, worse still, don't allow him to go and lose his manhood's dignity by crawling on all fours under the counter of a drug-store.
There is no virtue in compulsion. There is virtue only in liberty.
Ah! how I remember admiring in the hot days of blue-ribbonism in England that free Briton I once met who had a yellow ribbon in his button-hole!
'What's that you have on?' I said to him.
'That's a yellow ribbon,' he replied. 'I belong to the Yellow-Ribbon Army.'
'Ah! and what is it the Yellow-Ribbon Army do?' I inquired.