V
I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES
“And now,” said His Excellency, stroking his silvered brown beard and turning upon me the raillery of his dynamic dark eyes, “it’s up to you, Professor. You’ve been sitting here like one of Uncle Sam’s ‘observers’ at a peace conference—a chiel a-takin’ notes, an’ sayin’ nuthin’. Don’t you know that henceforth there shall be no more neutrals? You are our only representative of the great drouthy forward-looking West. Don’t you know that the business of a representative is to represent? The wife of my bosom is on the fence—a friendly noncombatant, as is proper to her sex. But Willys and I have got you backed into a corner. I’ve shown the economic necessity of prohibition. Willys has shown the religious necessity of drink. What is the Mid-West going to do about it? Which way are you going to break? Break, Professor! But stick, as we have done, to the necessities of the case.”
“I am as much a necessitarian as you are, Excellency,” I said.
“You’d better be,” chuckled Oliver. “Cæsar’s wives, I suspect, had better be necessitarians.”
“But I am as religious as Willys,” I added.
“That’s very right,” said Willys.
“And so,” I continued, “I shall take a middle ground.”
“I see,” said Oliver, “the golden mean, or temperance. Too little temperance is chronic inebriety. Too much temperance is teetotalism. Prohibition may and must be defended as the only known means to insure moderate drinking among the better sort of people. Exactly my position!”
“No, Excellency,” I said, “you don’t see. Mine is not exactly your position. I take the middle position according to a precept of Pascal: I seize upon both extremes and occupy all the ground between. But my extremes are not yours. The extremes which I have in mind are your economic necessitarianism and Willys’s religion—his theory of the necessity of religious excitement. I lay hold of both those positions as firmly as you and Willys; but I reconcile them, instead of making them mutually destructive. Starting from the same premises, I reach a different conclusion.”
“Of course,” said Oliver, “of course. But what is it?”