s of future drunkards,
the saloons and the clubs. We have saved the rising generation.' No
amount of misrepresentations can alter facts. The Americans are not
fools. They know their own business. 'In every community,' said
President Harding recently, 'men and women have had an opportunity to
know what Prohibition means. They know that debts are more promptly
paid, that men take home the wages that once were wasted in saloons,
that families are better clothed and fed, and more money finds its way
into the savings bank. In another generation I believe that liquor
will have disappeared, not merely from our politics, but from our
memories.'

VII

Great Britain led the world in the deliverance of humanity from the
degradation of slavery; the United States and Canada are leading the
world in the still greater deliverance of humanity from the degradation
of alcohol. Out of the West cometh the world's salvation. America,
that is for ever singing of itself as the 'sweet land of liberty,' is
now the seat of the greatest experiment in personal coercion that the
world has known. And that is because the American has freed his mind
from cant. He has replaced the conception of liberty as liberty to do
as we like by the conception of liberty which is the liberation of
large masses of the community from thraldom to their base appetites and
from the oppression of grafters and profiteers. The main cause of that
deliverance was the awakened conscience of the people. When the power
to veto licences was placed in the hands of the people, the citizens
became conscious of the fact that when they voted for a licence they
were just as much partners in the saloon as if they furnished the
liquor and sold it standing behind the bar. When they considered that
the poisoning of the poor by alcohol was a road to wealth, when they
traced the misery and ruin that afflicted the community to the saloons,
they felt that they could not any longer be sharers in the traffic nor
incur responsibility for it. It was the Churches of the land that
wakened the conscience of the people. It was better that any community
perish rather than that they should offend one of the little ones for
which Christ died.... What we need is that the conscience of the
community should be wakened in the same manner. The Church of Christ
alone can sound the trumpet that wakens from the slumber of torpor.
But the Church seems more concerned about dealing out soothi