The Decline of Drought

...But there are certain other aspects of the situation we cannot overlook...

...It also assumed that the economic test could be overlooked...

...But, granted that public opinion will be organized to the extent permitting the abolition of the Eighteenth Amendment, can the return of the saloon be prevented...

...Has youth been given the impression that all social preaching except that which inoculates a liberal attitude is stupid and reprehensible...

...This business is in every sense of the term honorable...

...The saloon was a kind of club officered by those who had the greatest stake in the profits and who believed in mergers long before twentieth-century banks thought of them...

...The gravest problems of national policy are discussed only by utilitarians, and the one remedy for unemployment is to shut down...

...Blunders are not crimes but when committed by responsible persons they are punished as justly and ruthlessly...

...The preacher, having crowned himself, is peered at by the multitude...

...Today he has been pilloried and pummeled to an extent which often seems genuinely alarming...

...State after state shows the dry forces in retreat before the attack of those who think the "noble experiment" no better than a stab at perpetual motion...

...It is true that he deserves every wallop...

...Perhaps there is something to be said now for these words of Emerson's address to the Cambridge divinity students: "My friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn...

...Expedientists have triumphed on every front...

...There will be no money to pay any of the tradesfolk, jobs will cease...

...It is tempered by political expediency...

...This truth has the universal self-evidence of the store-window...

...If the American public rises and blots out the Eighteenth Amendment, it may honor the occasion with a few bows to its old, discredited mentors, but everybody will realize that these are members of the party of the late departed...

...And quite apart from all such matters there was the fact that candidates for public office were measured not by their ability to think intelligently about the community's business, but by the intensity of the enthusiasm with which they would vote dry...

...Owing to the tradition and temperament of thousands of American villages and cities, liquor seemed to be the chief of the moralist's foes...

...There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat...

...There must be a carpenter, a butcher, a postman—among others—to make up your community...

...Or was it that he knew nothing about the state...

...For what, concretely expressed, does the present trend mean...

...Such a marked alteration in mentality is, of course, impossible...

...But they are insulated districts, comparatively unaffected by those tremendous migratory population drifts which constitute the dynamic United States of the present...

...Necessarily this was business...

...The public conscience was not opposed to the use and sale of liquor...

...Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him...

...Enforcement was an expensive activity the outstanding result of which—had it even in a measure succeeded—would have been to drive a host of wouldbe consumers out of the country...

...This declaration and the qualifications which accompany it are easily open to criticism from students of government...

...Unless all signs are misleading, New York state will be asked to choose between two candidates for the governor's office both of whom are in virtual agreement that the Eighteenth Amendment ought to be repealed in a way which will prevent the return of the old saloon...

...Of course the state exists to safeguard rights which are so much in accord with conscience that decent government has granted them so long ago as to make them seem natural...

...Thereby the moralist showed himself indifferent to the foremost purpose of the state...

...But this smith is not alone in his grandeur...

...And will the thirsty citizen insist upon getting a drink anywhere excepting in a saloon...

...This truth that the welfare of the individual depends upon what happens to the basic community enterprise needs to be borne in mind constantly, but it seems especially apt when discussion rages, as it does now, round such a problem as that created by the Eighteenth Amendment...

...They forgot completely that the moralist is not the only person in town, and that—to come back to our truism—the welfare of the individual depends upon what happens to the basic community enterprise...

...Will the constitution, in a lengthy postscript, distinguish carefully between Hinky Dink's and a hotel...

...And—nothing can make us believe that if the tide finally turns anybody can keep the old saloon permanently buried...

...In former ages the alliance between moral authority and government, though it had the excuse that the second was personal and set an example universally followed, ended in a rout...

...There were, first of all, the lurid cases of the ne'er-do-wells— old soaks and bar-room devotees whose alcoholic families lived in want and whose personal fortunes wrung the heart...

...Does the cartoon, current everywhere, of the croaking dry parson honestly express the conviction of modern America...

...Meanwhile the policy to which the government was committed proved economically very bad...

...On this point we are inclined to think that President Butler is right...

...Either repeal does not mean what the word implies, or it signifies that the right to control the manufacture and sale of liquor will be given back to the states...

...The people of the United States has not been converted...

...Then came the political and social effects of the places where liquor was sold...

...Here we Americans have arrived at a time when talk of the appropriate powers of the federal government in a given matter is determining the outcome of political campaigns and the future of party control...

...And the truth that years must elapse before the normal moralistic forces in our society recover their power and significance is the one genuine ominous creature bred by our twelve years of drought...

...But they made a mistake...

...Perhaps there are some regions where these queries are answered in the negative...

...On the surface it indicates a change of the public mind...

...The thou-shalt-nots which used to affect family life have gone into the discard like old phonograph records, while the divorcees romp back from Mexico City, and children—accidents will happen—go off to grandmother...

...As a whole we have tugged away from the moralist so hard that he has little left but a few strands of rope...

...Is the club or the restaurant a saloon...

...Finally the ministers and their associates were strong enough to wage a successful campaign for an amendment to the national constitution...

...The test of good government is always to be made with the instruments of economics...

...Holiness, earnestness, grace, beauty the community receives elsewhere than in its national capital...

...In both cases it was hopelessly wrong...

...Primarily, however, the state is neither the custodian of the conscience nor the agency for effecting the dictates of conscience...

...In order to show the interdependence of the public affected, he began by quoting a little rhyme which stressed the fact that every town, great and small, must have a smith...

...Realizing that thousands of citizens who believe that Volsteadism has failed would nevertheless resent the resurrection of the saloon, candidates propose that it shall be as dead as the Neanderthal man...

...It was inevitable that when the moralist's influence grew, hostility to the saloon would become more pronounced...

...For how shall we specify that the saloon must be outlawed...

...It is an old, old story but mankind seems unable to remember it...

...Prohibition came into existence because there lived in virtually every town a minister of the Gospel, an educator or a civically minded person whose business it was to look after and try to improve community morality...

...But if the industry upon which the community as a whole depends does not flourish, the smith and his fellows might as well move on...

...men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority—demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice—comes graceful and beloved as a bride...

...it has been awakened from indifference by a sequence of outcries and debates...

...In fact, the business probably outstripped all its former records, huge profits accruing to those subterranean sales forces which catered to millions...

...They possessed a more intelligent and more righteous leadership than saloon venality could boast of...

...Can we expect anything better after two centuries of individualism...

...Well, prohibition assumed that the moralist's right to oppose existing forms of liquor traffic was so generally endorsed by citizens that it could be underwritten by the government...

...The old-time saloon magnate had his money in prostitution and gambling, too, and kept a close watch on politics not merely for safety purposes but also because politics could be made to pay...

...then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, he put on terror and victory as a robe...