“The Professor,” he continued, “overdraws it a little; but there is much in what he says. Historically considered, we have, as a people, rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll; for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry; milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You’ll have to admit, Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on going in for a kick. It’s rooted in what you yourself called the primitive and profound necessities of our national temper.”
“It’s rooted,” said Willys, “in the artificial necessities created by our national puritanism. It’s rooted in the artificial necessity of being ashamed to drink at home, and having to live, like a false little Sunday-School god, in the eyes of a sanctified wife and puritanized children.”
“Really, Mr. Willys!” Cornelia exclaimed.
“It’s the truth,” insisted the novelist. “It is rooted in the necessity thrust upon a poor devil by the surrender of public opinion to the prohibition bullies—the necessity of carrying a portable kick in his hip pocket, or, in the old days, of standing up with his foot on the rail and taking it quick and getting out before his neighbor—came in for his.”
“No, cynic,” I said, “it is rooted in a deeper necessity than that—and a real one, which can’t be essentially changed. I mean, that our national custom of whiskey-drinking was rooted, like all bad things,—according to His Excellency,—in the Mid-West, rooted through a thousand miles of the richest corn-land in the world. Do you know that if the Atlantic Ocean were pumped dry and we Mid-Westerners applied our resources to it, we could fill the basin with corn whiskey every year? That is the real reason why a kick-loving people would, in America, always be a whiskey-drinking people. And that is one of the reasons why we Mid-Westerners have maturely decided to feed our corn to hogs.”
“A-ha!” cried Oliver. “Striking into your argument at last! Economic theory of morals! My argument! I ‘get’ you, as you Midlanders say.”
“Yes, Excellency,” I assented, “you get me very well. As a ‘friend of the plain people,’ you get me very well. I accept the whole of your economic argument for the necessity of prohibition. I accept every word that you say on the expensiveness of the reconstructed workman’s club, on the expensiveness of his wife’s post-bellum tastes, of the long future in which we may expect high wages, of the continued necessity for maximum production. But you hardly scratched the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad, inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we’ve been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing in the world. Prohibition—and the average man knows this, even the moderately intelligent workman knows this—prohibition has its tap root of necessity in the imperative choice of our entire society between ‘booze’ on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty, art, style, pleasure, knowledge, health, and comfort—which he knows, and you know, are the real tangible substance of modern upper-class religion.”
“Oho!” cried Willys. “Getting around to my argument at last. But it doesn’t sound much like what I mean by religion.”
“Religion!” cried Cornelia. “Why, it isn’t religion at all!”
“What is religion, my dear Cornelia?” I asked.