"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

When men feel the need of stimulation, yet dread the use of alcohol, they will search for help somewhere else. With the nominal decay of the rum influence in the United States some years ago, began the enormous sale of bitters, anodynes, narcotics, stimulants, nerve foods, brain foods, and other nostrums of similar purpose, with which the advertising columns of a great many newspapers, including most of the religious weeklies, were filled, as some are at the present time. In the city of New York, where there is one rum shop to every thirty families, it is not a common experience to smell opium or chloral in the breath of the man next you in church or street-car or business resort. But in the State of Maine, which has had more experience with close prohibition than all the other States of the Union combined, it is hard to go into any community of men without being made cognizant of the fact that resort to these stimulants is quite common in that virtuous State. I do not say this in contempt of Maine’s effort to get rid of liquor. The prohibition movement in Maine has done incalculable good in some directions. There is no other State in the Union in which young men have never been invited into bar-rooms, and do not know what public opportunity for drinking is.

Do I mean to say that alcoholic stimulants are absolute necessities of life? No; I do not, but—don’t underrate the meaning of that little word—but the majority of our voters do, and majorities rule in this country. There is altogether too much indulgence and drunkenness—too much yielding to the desire to “feel good.” The use of alcohol in large quantities has a bad effect upon the character and conduct of anyone; the temperance men will give you all the dreadful statistics you like as to the part rum plays in filling our jails, poorhouses and insane asylums, and God himself would shudder to tell us how many homes it ruins—how many widows and orphans it makes. On a division of the subject which is out of the province of statisticians, physicians will admit that more sexual immorality comes from rum than all other causes combined. There is no fear of overstating the aggregate bad effects of over-indulgence in liquor—it is beyond the power of words or figures to overstate it.

Having admitted that the curse of rum in the United States is quite as great as any moralist or prohibitionist has ever asserted, it follows that some remedy is necessary, and the question naturally occurs, What shall it be?

The almost unanimous reply will be, Control the demon by law. The majority of law-abiding citizens are quite willing to admit that this should be done, but the question arises and becomes more urgent year by year, What shall the law be? Shall it be in the direction of prohibition? The experience of several States, Maine no less than others, is overwhelmingly to the effect that prohibition does not prohibit. Perhaps not as much liquor is consumed in Maine as if there were open bars in every town. But anyone who is fond of a glass knows by experience that it is quite as easy to gratify his tastes in the State of Maine as it is in the city of New York. Worse still, the stranger going from another State to Maine, if he has any acquaintances at all in the prohibition State, is so importuned by hospitable souls, who wish to make him feel entirely at home, and as comfortable as he might be if he were in his native city or village, and has set before him liquors in such variety, that he generally goes to bed with a heavier head and awakes in the morning with a harder headache than if he had been in the worst rum-cursed portion of the country.

Have I heard the arguments in favor of prohibition? Well, can anyone help having heard them? No project ever placed before the public has been more earnestly and persistently advocated. But where is the sense of demanding a law against which you know the majority of the people will be arrayed? Suppose during momentary enthusiasm a State carries a prohibition law by a small majority, some drinking men themselves being constrained by their neighbors to vote for the law and against their own inclinations, how is the law to be maintained? By public opinion. Who creates public opinion? The majority. But the majority drink, and will continue to do so for some generations to come, unless all signs fail. Every State has a law against bribery and corruption of voters. Is bribery or corruption less common than before the law passed? No; it becomes worse year by year. Why? Because public opinion dare not and will not support the law. Personal interest, expressed in party feeling, winks at its violation—not all the while, but merely every time there is anything to be gained by it.

Both sides of the prohibition question were well put in a recent conversation between a prominent prohibitionist and Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Church, who has worked industriously for years to decrease the rum influence, but believes restriction is the only means practical. “Bishop,” said the prohibitionist, “if you saw a rattlesnake in the street, biting people and destroying human lives, would you kill it, or try to pen it up?” The bishop replied, “If I had been chasing it up and down the street for thirty years, trying to kill it but never succeeding in doing anything but make it uglier, I would consider myself lucky if I had a chance to pen it up.”

Then should law take the form of restriction? Yes; but immediately the law-makers discover in the words of some satirist of the past generation, that a great many men can be found in favor of a certain provision in law, who are against its enforcement by any method that is suggested in the form of a bill before any Legislature or Congress. A restrictive measure immediately affects a great many business interests. Moralists would like the sale of liquor restricted. Well, so would a great many liquor dealers. If a poll were taken of the wholesale dealers in liquors in the United States, regardless of section or environment, it would be overwhelmingly in favor of limiting the number of rum-shops, and compelling the sale of only the better class of goods. Perhaps the wholesale dealers are not philanthropists, but their work is in the direction of philanthrophy in the respect that they make more money on old and well-refined liquors, and consequently would prefer that nothing else should be sold.

Restriction can be attained in no other way except through license laws, and upon these at once the entire public agree to disagree. A license law that would regulate the traffic in a large city would be utterly destructive of the entire retail liquor interests of the country districts. Consequently the country dealers, through their representatives in Legislatures, protest strongly against any such enactment as the famous Scott bill, which was of such great service in restricting the liquor trade in the State of Ohio. The license exacted from a retailer in a large city would consume the entire profit of a country dealer, even if he were the only one in his town. City prices and country prices are different. It may be also stated upon undoubted authority, for the information of prohibitionists and other gentlemen who have never looked into the practical details of the liquor trade for themselves, that the countryman’s drink compares with that of the city man about as a full bath-tub does to a basin of water.

After restriction, and lowest, though not least important, among the list of reformatory measures, comes the principle of regulation. Can the liquor trade be regulated? Should it be regulated in the interest of morality and the public safety? Yes. We regulate everything else—absolutely everything—that affects the safety of humanity. We stipulate by law or special license where dynamite factories shall be located, how dynamite shall be transported, where it shall be stored, how it shall be sold, and every other stage of the trade in this dangerous yet useful article of commerce. We regulate the trade in gunpowder; there are very few States in which any minor is allowed to purchase any quantity of gunpowder or any other explosive. We regulate the sales of poisonous medicines, no matter how useful they may be, forbidding the chemist to sell them except on a physician’s order, and we make him keep them specially classified, and label every package or bottle or box of them which he sells, and to record the name of the purchaser. We regulate even the speed of horses in large cities; although every man is supposed to be able to take his ease and pleasure with a horse and carriage if he can afford them or hire them, in all large communities it is required that he shall not drive at more than a certain pace. None of these regulations are regarded as abridgements of personal liberty. All of them are admitted to be necessary precautions for the good of the entire community.

Unfortunately the principal opposition to regulation, which is the easiest and most practicable method of reducing the dangers of the rum traffic, comes not from rum-drinkers themselves, but from those who never consume any liquor—I mean the prohibitionists. Their principle seems to be the old, big-hearted, but utterly impracticable one of “a whole loaf or none.” In a number of recent local and State elections, in which the regulation of the liquor traffic was concerned, the prohibitionists usually voted with the advocates of free rum, not that they love liquor or liquor dealers, but that unless they could have their own way they preferred to leave things as they were before. Their purpose, as nearly as it can be discovered, was that the more fearful condition society could be brought to by the free use of rum, the sooner would society protest strongly against it and take “the only true view,” this being the prohibitionist’s modest way of putting his own opinion. The Russian Nihilists, whom everybody detests, work on the same principle;—things can’t be better until they have first been as bad as they can.