“Better England Free Than England Sober?”
This does not mean that every argument of the other side is valid. In most of the public protestations, especially from the Middle West, far too much is made of the claim that all the Puritanic laws and the whole prohibitionist movement are an interference with personal liberty. It is an old argument, indeed, “Better England free than England sober.” For public meetings it is just the kind of protest which resounds well and rolls on nobly. We are at once in the midst of the “most sacred” rights. Who desires that America, the idol of those who seek freedom from the tyranny of the Old World, shall trample on the right of personal liberty? And yet those hundreds of singing-societies which have joined in this outburst of moral indignation have forgotten that every law is a limitation of personal liberty. The demand of the nation must limit the demands of the individual, even if it is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who is directly hurt. No one wants to see the lottery or gambling-houses or the free sale of morphine and cocaine permitted, or slavery, even though a man were to offer himself for sale, or polygamy, even though all wives should consent. To prevent temptation toward ruinous activities is truly the State’s best right, and no injury to personal liberty. The German reflects gladly how much more the German State apparently intrudes upon personal freedom: for instance, in its splendid State insurance for old age and accidents.
To be sure, from this German viewpoint it is hard to understand why the right of the State to subordinate personal wishes to national ones should not carry with it a duty to make compensation. To him the actions of some Southern States appear simply as the confiscation of property. When, as has happened, a captain of industry erects, for instance, a most costly brewery, and the State in the following year prohibits the sale of beer, turning the large, new establishment into a huge, useless ruin, without giving the slightest compensation, the foreigner stands aghast, wondering if to-morrow a party which believes in the State ownership of railroads may not prohibit railroading by private companies without any payment to the present owners.
Yet the political aspect does not concern the social psychologist. I abstract from it as from many others. There is, indeed, no limit to the problems which ought to be studied most seriously before such a gigantic revolution is organized. The physician may ask whether and when alcohol is real medicine, and the physiologist may study whether it is a food and whether it is rightly taken as helpful to nutrition; but this is not our problem. The theologians may quarrel as to whether the Bible praises the wine or condemns the drinker, whether Christ really turned water into that which we call wine, and whether Christianity as such stands for abstinence. It is matter for the economist to ask what will become of the hundred thousands of men who are working to-day in the breweries and related industries. 440 A labor union claims that “over half a million men would be thrown out of employment by general prohibition, who, with their families, would make an army of a million human beings robbed of their means of existence.” And the economist, again, may consider what it might mean to take out the license taxes from the city budgets and the hundreds of millions of internal revenue from the budget of the whole country. It is claimed that the brewers, maltsters, and distillers pay out for natural and manufactured products, for labor, transportation, etc., seven hundred million dollars annually; that their aggregate investments foot up to more than three thousand millions; and that their taxes contribute three hundred and fifty millions every year to the public treasuries. Can the country afford to ruin an industry of such magnitude? Such weighty problems cannot be solved in the Carrie Nation style: yet they are not ours here.
The Lonely Drinker of the Temperance Town
Nearer to our psychological interest comes the well-known war-cry, “Prohibition does not prohibit.” It is too late in the day to need to prove it by statistics: every one knows it. No one has traveled in prohibition States who has not seen the sickening sight of drunkards of the worst order. The drug-stores are turned into very remunerative bars, and through hidden channels whiskey and gin flood the community. The figures of the United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue tell the story publicly. In a license State like Massachusetts, there exists one retail liquor dealer for every 525 of population; in a prohibition State like Kansas, one for every 366. But the secret story is much more alarming. What is the effect? As far as the health of the nation and its mental training in self-control and in regulation of desires are concerned, the result must be dangerous, because, on the whole, it eliminates the mild beverages in favor of the strong drinks and substitutes lonely drinking for drinking in social company. Both are psychologically and physiologically a turn to the worse. It is not the mild beer and light wine which are secretly imported; it is much easier to transport and hide whiskey and rum, with their strong alcoholic power and stronger effect on the nerve-cells of the brain. And of all forms of drinking none is more ruinous than the solitary drink, as soon as the feeling of repugnance has been overcome; there is no limit and no inhibition. If I look back over the last years, in which I often studied the effects of suggestion and hypnotism on habitual drinkers, I do not hesitate to say that it was in most cases an easy thing to cure the social drinker of the large cities, but very hard to break the lonely drinker of the temperance town. Of course, prohibition reduces somewhat the whole quantity of consumption, but it withdraws the stimulant, in most cases, where it would do the least harm and intensifies the harm to the organism where it is most dangerous.
Our Greatest Danger—Disregard for Law
But man is not only a nervous system. Prohibition forced by a majority on an unwilling minority will always remain a living source of the spirit of disregard for law. Yet, “unwilling” minority is too weak an epithet; the question is of a minority which considers the arbitrary rule undemocratic, absurd, immoral, and which really believes that it is justified in finding a way around a contemptible law.
Judges know how rapidly the value of the oath sinks in courts where violation of the prohibition laws is a frequent charge, and how habitual perjury becomes tolerated by respected people. The city politicians know still better how closely blackmail and corruption hang together, in the social psychology, with the enforcement of laws that strike against the beliefs and traditions of wider circles. The public service becomes degraded, the public conscience becomes dulled. And can there be any doubt that disregard of law is the most dangerous psychological factor in our present-day American civilization? It is not lynch law which is the worst; the crimes against life are twenty times more frequent than in Europe, and as for the evils of commercial life which have raised the wrath of the whole well-meaning nation in late years, has not disregard of law been their real source? In a popular melodrama the sheriff says solemnly: “I stand here for the law”; and when the other shouts in reply, “I stand for common sense!” night after night the public breaks out into jubilant applause. To foster this immoral negligence of law by fabricating hasty, ill-considered laws in a hysterical mood, laws which almost tempt toward a training in violation of them, is surely a dangerous experiment in social psychology.