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■UId' ’i 'J THE CLINTON CHRONICLE. CLINTON. S. C. THURSDAY. AUGUST 4. 1332 LETS REFRESH OUR MINDS ON THE UQUOR QUESTION hi iy^P»l==“l==»F=»l=?l=l==>l==i|=aF=l|=dr=l|==ltJ|=dt=di=Ji=ili=dBdF=Jp=l|=di=d,=d scEvation opposite wouW Amefica, at present, U drinkinfr, in large part, belcauae Amei^cans have \ ■-4 J^n caught in that world^wide move- * i-fwanl By Stanley Hijfh, Ccntribuling Editor ' In the AuRUst Issue of the Christian Herald I am a prohibitionist. But not a'the jobless workers of Detroit, *1 did Divine Right prohibitionist. That is, I not see.” he said, “a single workman do not believe thatXthe Eighteen In Amendment is sTpart of the faith once under the influent e of liquor. 1*. is un tninkable tliat that would be the- case ment of social unrestraint which has altered the post-war attitude of peo ple toward a good many things, of which liquor is only one. The wets de clare, for example that women didn’t drink before prohibition. Well, neither, for that matter, did they smoke. Moreover, if it*s prohibition that has made people drink more in the deivered. to the saints. It is, rather, a piece-of legislative ' machinery which deserves support only so long.^s^it ts producing what it w’as desigried for and no longer. The American' people are not morally bound to believe in the desirability of the Eighteenth Amendment. But in so- far as they back in the days of the saloon.” Last I United Siates, w’hat is it that is mak- month the Salvation .Army made a re- J|*^? them drink more in Canada? Back port on its lodging houses in Chicago.'i^ the prohibition period the Canadian* In 16 months. 1,100,000 lodgings had | wets argued just as our wets argue.| "been provided and among that nnm-( Nobody wants to drink, they said. Wei ber there were only 75 cases of drunk- a-ce just drinking because we can’t. enness. The same report points out that whereas under pre-prohibi don Therefore, in the interests of wet tem perance, these arguments were lis- are civilized, the American, people arc i conditions of state control ninety ]tr,tcned to. Prohibition was done away morally bound to believe in the de- ctni of the needy families visited'were sirability of reducing and eventually in need because 6f the liquor evil, to- eliminating the drink evil. day, with prohibition, the percentage It is comforting to note that both 'ad been reduced to the vanishing the wets and drys agree on that—par Point- >*»»» Evangeline Booth declar- ticularly the wets. In fact, it is litt!-:. <*d. recently, that in New York City, short of miraculous how widely prohi- u^’der the old system, from 1,200 to bition has-aroused a social conscience drunks were brought into the on the drink evil in ceitain socially Army’s homes every night. Today, distingushed quarUrs where, before with prohibition, the number does notj prohbition, such a conscience was not- average more than reven. j ably lacking. The orthodox wet and i It will be easy, I suppose, for some the orthodox dry start, therefore, on I people to ignore that kind of testi- common "ground. They are bothj mony. But it is not easy to descredit against liquor whenever and wher-|it. .Meanwhile, I have often wondered ever it is an evil. | why the wets, while they are making Thev go. 1 think, a bit further on; many converts at the upper end of common groundr I have listened to! the social scale, didn’t underUke a lit- manv recent and eloquent wet pot-' tie of their missionary work among trayks of conditions as they are. and, the nation’s settlement workers; or I am no more satisfied with them than | the officers, let s say, of the peopl position to provide leadership for the settling of this i.-sue. But those points, 1 should say, just abou\ maik the limits of wet-dry agreement. Th<‘ wets, with much per- ■suasiverM's.'. W(juld lead us to believe that these had ctinditions are directly, due. to prohibition; that they are wor.-H* than they were Indore prohi bition; and that, in cons<*<|uence, the 1 hey have to demon.strale to .Miss Booth, for example, how a legalized liquetr traffic that in liM7 s<*nt 1,200 drunks into the Army’s homes every night will work better.in 10H2 to re duce the drink evil than the prohibi tion system that ha.s reduced that numlH'r to seven. . Or, if you don’t like life at that so cial level, let’s look at the youth of (»bvious way to corrcH t them is to re- j the nation. They are being debauched, tiiin to our pre-prohibition situation. I the wets, by prohibition. Well, it .Now. it sicms to me de.-irable to re-1 » vgr>' cheering to observe how^the call what it is, just now. that the wets long-kanding problem of liquor and are fighting for. They have passed. young people has, so vt^ry recently, in their campaign, through a variety aroused such great concern in circles of stages. They have .stood^from time I which were notably unconcerned be- to time, for beer, for light wines andjfmf. One can only hope that these beer, and for other substitutes for the. wholesale conversions are dictated by present system too numerous to men-1 anti-liquor conviction rather than by tion. At present, however^, wet opinion j anti-prohibition .strategy, seems to be converging on the idea of| Now, I am not seeking to deny the state control. And state control, itjcuirent drink evil among young peo- should be pointed out, is our own pre-1 pit*. I know that in many places there prohibition system all over , again, are speakeasies accessible to the col- However dexterou.sly it is dressed up lege campu.s and bootleggers that and perfumed it can not be passed off specialize in the college trade. -And I as anything else. j have observed that they do a particu- Now, l)efore we are hustled back lary thriving business at those sea- into a state control regime we need sons of the year when tin* old grads first (»f all to In* convinced that whatl return to the campus for reunion. But ■we’ve got is worse than what yi'c had ;| they do too good a busines.s at othe and that the drink evil under pnthi-j time.s; u business that, for the sal^ bition is worse than the drink «‘vil be- of young people, ought to be cut j/ilf. fore 1)1 ohil)ition. It conviction that the with. The liquor interests began their inevitable cahnpaign to humanize and popularize ^eir produiict- ’The news papers put back their liquor adver-i tisements. And the -wet panacea work-| ed—for the wets. Tbe .consumption of i liquor in the Dominion promptly in-1 creased, between 1923 and 1928, byi^ 149 per cent. Our wet friends, doubtless, would blame that on the irritating proximity of these prohibition. United States. W’ell./We can move’off a bit. We can take Enkand. If it is prohibition th^j accounts for the increased popularity of liquor in American society, how arej we to account for its increased popu-j larity in British society? How is it| that, without prohibition. Great Brit-j ain, in the last five years has been i confronted with a constantly increas-1 ing problem of hard-liquor excesses CfK-ktail turbing a British I wetl America. No, it is just too simple to say that America i.s drinking because .America has prohibition. We are the victims, here, of the sanoe social, forces which, since the war. have infreased the li- (juor evil everywhere. But we are the viclin s of more than that. We are the victims of prop aganda which 'or a decade, ha« been deliberately at the business of piipu- larizing Liquor. That undoubtedly ha.s been .sound wet tactics. If the law were to be destroyed it had, first, to> be proved a failure. If it were to b<^i proved a failure it had. first, widely broken. It couldn’t be broken, in any w’holesale fashion, unle^-.s indi viduals in wholesale fashion were per suaded to drink. And that precisely is what happened. For ten years the harmless delights of drinking have been preached by movies, newspapers, magazines and by the aggressive ex-* ample of large numbers of people, un til liquor has become a virtue ami I cocktails the necessary prerequisite toi entrance into certain so-raH^ select* circles of s<H‘iety. And many imliriduals have l*egun to /drink, not because they couldn’t' Jt ^t along without it or. hecaus«* even 1 -r/lhey are {particularly fond of liquor, but IxH-ause.they are just Uhp weak to | resist the stn-ial pressure. They a I i a a a a a n arc IS preri.vfly that j Ht.wever, it is a long and prec^ious, .scK'iety’s ittle “yec-yes” pe.pple. Their wet.s jir<- out to jump from that assertion to fix in out: ijuiuls.. .1- iuiar .ei'cry day»- txoit wet Trmrlusib-tfthat yo te cur- drihks that then* is more diinking no'v\’ than more than before prohibitiitn. before pi ihibition. The unsupiiorted! After all, who says sir^ The same j'liimess with which that remark is' folks say so who .say that drinking parsed around remind.s me of the fa-j generally is greater, and they .say it mous advertising slogan, “you can i with just as much glibnes.s and as few t< a. h a parrot to say just as good, j fact b-al he won’t know what he’s talking I years ago, the "Literary Dige.st" made about.’’ la survey of the heads of the 213 lead- .\ow ju. t what was this pre-prohi-! ing colleges and universities of the precarious social j»qsitiq;:](._ih.ey- hope, win \>e strengtiu't ed if they are al ways ready With a cockstail or always handy with a cocktail shaker. !t isn’t a new law that th«*se pe«»p!e ne«*d, bul^ a new backbone. .Meanwhile, if our wets and our wet 0 There are some fact.*’, ..A few new.'-paivers sjrent half the energy dis- ITI credtiing liquor that they now spend ' [I discrediting prohibition, wt would “ probably be well on our way to the bition .situation to which we are being j country. The overwhelming results led ! temperance ideal for which they have uiged to return? You might;think, to j the "Digest” to sum it up in these hear it described, that it wa.<< alliword.s: “there are actually' fewer drinkers in the colk'ges now than in the sweetness and ligljt. Well, it wasn’t. You might think that the li«juor traf fic was well-behaved and the liquor interests lincil up overwhelmingly on dents,” Tw6 laU*r similar surveys the side of decency. Well, it wasn’t i brought the same results, and the y -weren’t. Pre-prt)hibition j Or, take the high schools. Two America wasn’t ridding herself of the years ago the National Education As- drink evil. Far from it. From 1900 to j sociation, composed of 160,000 school the^eve.qf the World War, the con-1 teachers, made an official study of sumption of alcoholic liquors in the'drinking among 1,000,000 high school Unfted States steadily increased year studenLs and found out two things: after year. By 1911 it had reached the, first, that drinking now was le«s than point where our drinks, annually, j before prohibition, and, second, that amounted to 22.4:i gallons for every such drinking as there was was sU-ad- man, woman and child in the United ! ily decreasing. While this was being StaU s. .Nobody knows exactly how j written. Dr. Alfred Worcester, health much is drunk today. But the United J sui)ervi8or of the students at Har- States Bureau-of I’robrbitkm prc^)ably,|va«i Univerrity, made tha-publk dec--, knows as nearly as can be found out. laration that drinking among Har-' lately become so zealous. Until they do, one can be pardoned a few doubts about the anti-liquor convictions of days when there were only one- {the anti-prohibitionists. The real test third the present number of stu- of their dependability is not what they do, eventually, to get rid of prohibi- tion, but what they are doing, mean while to get rid of liquor. And the Bureau’s estimate for 1930 was that the average per capita con sumption, including homerbrew, was But the wets not only want to rid of prohibition because they want to get rid of liquor but because they want, ^also, to get rid of liquor law lessness. They insist that it is prohi bition that has made liquor lawless. That is a naive assumption that will only be acceptable to people wnth .«hort memories. Bootleggers and speakeasies are not prohibitionrmade expressions and liquor lawnessness is; -nutZ a... .prnhihitinndMoed. .phenomenon, I Quite the contrary. Liquor has been, I 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 I slightly more than seven gallons.^ i'heard precisely that opinion expressed vard undergraduates had just now | uniformly and invariably lawless reached the lowest level in the past; And yet the wets would have us be- two or three years. I have recently j lieve that it is prohibition that has Even our current wet eloquence can hardly expand those seven gallons tojin two other universities in the look like twenty-two. ' Fast. bv men in somewhat similar positions wet” And how do our wet friends pro pose to demonstrate that a pre-prohi bition system that increased our made the liquor business bad. It is one thing to agree that there are, to- j day, too many speakeasies and boot-1 leggers. It is quite another thing to; agree that — contrary to seventy-five Now all this is not hearsay. It is not parrotism. It is eNndence. And yet:years of painful experience—we would it is safe to say that the very per.son- get rid of them if we got rid of pro drinking m that fashion would, today.i^We young ladies who, in the name of I hibkion. better to destroy the drink < j(|^Ying the younger generation from| Of course liquor, we are told, fi-lWl Til than a prohibition—system that;the drink evil, tried to sell repeal nances, the rackets. Certainly, it fi-i ^ has so materially reduced that drinic- i plates for my automobile a few days nances ntany of then—and did before mgi ago, are still out repeating their tai-1 the Eighteenth .Amendment. But that _ But it is not necessary to use gov- ]or-made conclusions. For ten years, ernment sUtistics. There is other evi- i j y,ave heard this debauchery of youth deoce. Let’s look, for example, at eon- i refrain. But in all that time I have ditiona at the bottom of the social j ^ever heard that a single wet organi-|into such a system. weAi^ to refresh •*•1*—• good place, I should say, forj^a^iyp much as raided a little fin-'our memories a bit as t^.what it is it is prohibitiM^ that has made the gangsters is a dw^iable question. Before we hurry bark, therefore. some of our wet friends to do some,g^r jjy ^ survey process, kwking. It the pre-prohibition system; whether the facts justified the iCsser- a better answer to the liquor evil I tion. The only possible explanation of among the poor man than the probi- j that neglect seems to be that there is bition system, or isn’t it. The wets | n widespread wet conviction that the say that it Is. Well, there ^ey are facts wouldn’t justify the assertion. in mnflict with the experts. The Na tional Federation of Settlement! But there is more to the wet argu- ment than this generality about in- wanted to answer ttot question, sold eased drinking. The weU tell us they made a nation-wide survey which led te the conclosion, to quote them. **tiw.t prohibition has help^ the low er wage' group ererywhere.” Or here is Whitinr WiKiams, one of Ameri-^ ea’a'leading indnstrfasi inyestigators, whe reported to a Senate Commitl^'e weeks he had tpenk a Uut summ» disguised. smong AL - tfiat we ought to get rid of prohibi tion, nbt only because there is more drinking, but ^ause it is prohibition that makes us drink. People drink, in other words, not because they like liquor but because they don't like the law. That is easy to say, of course, but hard to prove. In fact, if personal ob- that we are hurrying backxto; we need to furnish our miiKls a bit with the facts of what has been accompish-! g ed; and we need to hare something || more definite than vehement generali ties to indicate how what has been accompished could, without prohibi tion, be accomplished better. Until there is an answer to those questions we would do well to keep oar present system, not because pvohibitkMi is al together good, but bceaasie there is so little concrete evidence, cither in our own experience or in that of other na tions, to indicate that the heat of wet Substitutes offers anything better. SUBSJRIBE TO THE :BRQN1CLB ■""N 0 'X ■ ./ JOB PRINTING DELIVERED PROMPTLlf T- Let Us Do Your / Printing! Our Job Printing Department wishes to bring to the attention of every user of job [Minting a thought on service. 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