As lately as 1920 the moderate wine-drinker in the United States was laughing at the idea of J dry America.” But Prohibition has come, and his glass of good wine has gone.
YOUR glass of wine will go too if you do not defend it.
HELP yourself. The citizen, not the trade, can win this fight.
Watch your elections, and rouse up your fellow-electors. Few candidates risk standing openly as Prohibitionists ; but, cloaked as Local Optionists, as Nationalists, as State-Purchasers or merely as ” Temperance Reformers,” they are already busy sapping your liberties.
Keep teetotal tyrants out of Parliament and out of your Borough and County Councils. If “they are already in, work to turn them out at the next elections. Faddists are not the men to be entrusted with the direction of public affairs and with the spending of taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money.
England,-say the American intruders, is to be made dry by the women’s vote. Find out what they are telling your womenfolk, and explain to them the other side.
Prohibition means more taxes, more drug-taking, more discontent.
Results of Prohibition in U.S.A. 1923.
The late President Harding, in his Annual Message to Congress on December Sth, 1922, summed up the existing conditions in these words : “In plain speaking, there arc conditions relating to its enforcement which savour of nation-wide scandal. It is the most demoralising factor in our public life. Most of the people assume that the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment meant the elimination of the question from our politics. On the contrary, it has been so intensified as an issue that many voters are disposed to make all political decisions with reference to this single question.”
Dr. Angell, President of Yale University, declared in his address to the graduating students last year that ” the violation of law has never been so general nor so widely condoned as at present.”
Justice Clarke, of the United States Supreme Court, addressing the students of the New York University Law School, said : ” The Eighteenth Amendment required millions of men and women to abruptly give up habits and customs of life which they thought not immoral or wrong, but which, on the contrary, they believed to be necessary to their reasonable comfort and happiness, and thereby, as we all now sec, respect not only for that law, but for all law, has been put to an iinprccedented and demoralising strain in our country, the end of which it is difficult to see.”
Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, in an address delivered before the Ohio State T3ar Association last January, made the assertion : ” That disregard of law, disobedience to law, and contempt for law have greatly increased and are still increasing in this country is not to be doubted. . . . It is rather a sorry outcome of our century and a half of existence as an independent nation, proclaiming to the world the discovery of the best possible method of providing for liberty under law, that we should now be pointed to as the law-breaking nation par excellence.”
From the Book “Harry” of Ciro’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails by Harry MacElhone, London, 1921.
