Like a Ram's Horn
LIKE A RAM'S HORN IT IS no secret that we have been, editorially speak-ing, opposed to the Eighteenth Amendment. Everything we have been able to learn about American civic experience during the...
...Everybody knows that an otherwise perfectly legitimate opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment has let down the bars...
...Clarence True Wilson is one thing, debauch is another...
...There is no drift toward wines and beers, regardless of the feeling that making these available might lessen the evils now existing...
...Today, in our general aversion to Volsteadism, we are suffering from something quite like a veritable "gin epidemic...
...Bootleg spirits, concocted frequently of raw alcohol, are available at prices which the very poorest can afford...
...Father Mathew's method was the famous "pledge," which bound the individual to foreswear alcohol in all its forms...
...We shall be doing the coming generation a great wrong if we fail to teach how utterly every person of whom Christendom is proud was committed to that soberness and justice of living which is recommended as a sign of election in the very constitution of the Faith...
...It all means that we are steadily exposing ourselves to, are sometimes actually inviting our young people to seek out, the degradation which invaded English life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...
...Everything we have been able to learn about American civic experience during the past five years confirms us in that opposition...
...Joseph Livesay and his English followers therefore advocated total abstinence from all forms of alcoholic drink...
...But among the effects of prohibition none is more regrettable and manifest than the tendency to render unpopular salutary and more than legitimate endeavors to foster temperance...
...At smart parties cocktails of blended spirits and absinthe are served to young and old, male and female, without regard for varying degrees of intoxication...
...Look honestly at the situation among Catholics...
...Too frequently this sort of pronouncement is merely a cloak for moral and civic incompetence...
...Among Catholics the great leader was Father Theobald Mathew, an Irish priest who made a tour of the United States and rallied hundreds of thousands to his cause...
...A recent visitor to a middle-western state was offered, in a farm community, his choice of several brands of locally manufactured whisky which men who recalled the days of yore pronounced excellent...
...Even the rural districts, which have taken more widely than the cities to home-made brews, have been veering steadily to distilled products...
...We are convinced, therefore, that any impartial observer, confronting the evidence now amassed, must necessarily believe that Vosteadism as a social remedy is as ineffective in practice as it is extreme in theory...
...In Protestant circles Miss Frances E. Willard was the great leader, and to her is due in large measure the successes of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, still the most influential society of its kind and pledged to foster abstinence by attacking the liquor traffic itself...
...One sometimes believes that practically no social gathering is complete without the aroma of alcohol...
...No annals of human perversity are more harrowing to read than the records of the "gin epidemic" which cluttered the gutters of London and other cities with befuddled men, women and children...
...Does not a quite obvious glamour attach to the person who gets drunk...
...Parliament was helpless, despite the passage of law after law...
...Statistics tended to show that when the drinking of spirits declined, the consumption of beer rose...
...Statistics indicate that even the saloons were becoming the property of the brewers...
...Twenty years ago, no group was more actively laboring for temperance...
...In not a few states Irish and German Catholics were among the most ardent advocates of restraint...
...And where is the family which dares refuse its week-end guests quantities of gin which in days not long past would have given whole hamlets the headaches of their lives ? It seems impossible that young people should realize, under such conditions, that strong liquor has ruined careers and wasted fortunes...
...In the United States development of the temperance reform reveals a similar trend...
...The earliest organizations were directed specifically against drunkenness...
...They want to reach young people-to warn them that while a concept of personal liberty which differs from that held by Dr...
...The Catholic Total Abstinence Union had 100,000 members, and temperance addresses were popular...
...For that can only mean, these days, greasing the inclined plane which leads to struggle with the most genuine of alcoholic demons-drinks often unwholesome in themselves, and always stronger than nature's intention...
...Hundreds of priests had taken pledges themselves, and were in the habit of securing one kind or another of promise from first communicants, those who were confirmed, or Holy Name Society men...
...and a growing tendency to substitute wine and beer for spirits...
...None of the blessings which the advocates of prohibition predicted is discernible anywhere...
...The situation is so obvious that many prelates, priests and laymen are alarmed and are planning to revive old endeavors to foster temperance...
...The history of the temperance movement is an interesting commentary on our present situation...
...We believe that a candidate who announces that he is on either side of this question-either wet or dry, that is-invites special attention to his motives and record...
...One part of this revulsion expressed itself as "teetotalism," which was largely a protest of logic against reality...
...There are just two aspects of the situation which seem to us to deserve stressing at present...
...and in the end such progress as was made toward sanity sprang from a revulsion of public feeling...
...The need of a real curb did not appear until the seventeenth century, when the price of spirits for the first time became low enough to permit widespread indulgence...
...Thus two forms of attrition were grinding rapidly at the worst evils of drink-the appeal of total abstinence and the trend to fermented beverages...
...It has led to the suppression of no other vice...
...Secondly, it is imperatively necessary to give the right sort of example to young people in the domain of temperance...
...Legislation to control traffic in liquors is comparatively modern, it being affirmed that England had no such law until Henry VIII's time...
...Drinking is now fashionable...
...It was only gradually that insistence upon complete abstinence became the normal slogan of temperance societies...
...and this, with various changes, lived on vigorously until after the coming of prohibition...
...Anybody who invites respect or emulation by reason of his position (be he clerical or lay) must avoid popularizing indulgence...
...Socially speaking, all this activity resulted in two important facts: the acceptance by a large number of citizens of total abstinence as a rule in personal morals...
...And today...
...The law has not rooted out either drunkenness or the sale of alcoholic beverages...
...With this movement we have every sympathy and shall encourage it as much as we possibly can...
...and liqueurs were practically unknown to the great majority of Americans...
...The first is the danger of making prohibition a political issue, under cover of which perfectly disreputable nonentities may appeal for the support of wet voters, including Catholics...
...Nobody forgot that drunkenness is a sin, that hundreds of families had been ruined by the habit, and that indulgence of one sort opens the door to excesses of all kinds...
...and instead our large cities are suffering more and more from the corruption attendant upon illicit traffic, mushroom growth of speakeasies masked as restaurants and night-clubs, and political connivance with groups whom the courts must list as outlaws...
...And even their teachers not infrequently merit, when under the influence of a favorite brew, all the epithets which have gone into descriptions of flaming youth...
...One of the very first-an association of farmers at Litchfield, Connecticut-did little more than agree not to give liquor to hired men, while another ruled that any member found intoxicated would have to pay a fine...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 18
