South Carolina was for some time, and is still partially, under the “dispensary” system, the State undertaking the function of providing its citizens with alcohol. The dispensary is open only during limited hours, and no liquor may be drunk on the premises. This system has proved the reverse of satisfactory from the point of view of the temperance reformer, while corruption has fleeced the State of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purchase of its liquors.
There have been “waves” of prohibition in America before, which have more or less receded as time went on. Will that be the history of this wave? The best authorities do not think so.
Has Prohibition Come to Stay?
In the first place, as I have said before, the South is deeply and earnestly religious. The Churches are all opposed to the liquor traffic, and it has been said that “a proposition to restore it would encounter from them almost the same reception as a proposition to restore a State Church establishment.”
In the second place, the presence of the negro in the South is a tower of strength to the prohibitionist.
In the third place, the rapid industrial revival of the South is making men alive to the economic waste involved in the liquor traffic.
In the fourth place, prohibition has touched the patriotic imagination of the South, which is a very lively faculty indeed.
On this subject I spoke to Dr. E. A. Alderman, President of the University of Virginia. In that State local option has banished the saloon from almost all the country districts and from most of the towns. Charlottesville, the seat of the University, is, according to Dr. Alderman, distinctly a better town since it “went dry.” Manners are better, the standard of comfort is higher, there is more money to spend.
“It seems to me,” said Dr. Alderman, “that society has an absolute right to protect itself against the evils of alcohol, just as it has the right to take compulsory measures of sanitation. Whether the best method of protection has as yet been reached, I won’t undertake to say. But I think you may safely assume that in the Southern States the age of the open grog-shop is past.”