uppression of individuality,
the exaltation of the collective will and the collective interest, the
submergence of the individual will and the individual interest. The
particular form--even the particular degree--of coercion by which this
submergence is brought about varies with the different types of
Socialism; but they all agree in the essential fact of the
submergence. Socialism may possibly be compatible with prosperity,
with contentment; it is not compatible with liberty, not compatible
with individuality. I am, of course, not undertaking here to discuss
the merits of Socialism; my purpose is only to point out that those
who are hostile to Socialism must cherish liberty. And it is vain to
cherish liberty in the abstract if you are doing your best to dry up
the very source of the love of liberty in the concrete workings of
every man's daily experience. With the plain man--indeed with men in
general, plain or otherwise--love of liberty, or of any elemental
concept, is strong only if it is instinctive; and it cannot be
instinctive if it is jarred every day by habitual and unresented
experience of its opposite. Prohibition is a restraint of liberty so
clearly unrelated to any primary need of the state, so palpably
bearing on the most personal aspect of a man's own conduct, that it is
impossible to acquiesce in it and retain a genuine and lively feeling
of abhorrence for any other threatened invasion of the domain of
liberty which can claim the justification of being intended for the
benefit of the poor or unfortunate. So long as Prohibition was a local
measure, so long even as it was a measure of State legislation, this
effect did not follow; or, if at all, only in a small degree. People
did not regard it as a dominant, and above all as a paramount and
inescapable, part of the national life. But decreed for the whole
nation, and imbedded permanently in the Constitution, it will have an
immeasurable effect in impairing that instinct of liberty which has
been the very heart of the American spirit; and with the loss of that
spirit will be lost the one great and enduring defense against
Socialism. It is not by the argumentation of economists, nor by the
calculations of statisticians, that the Socialist advance can be
halted. The real struggle will be a struggle not of the mind but of
the spirit; it will be Socialism and regimentation against
individualism and liberty. The cause of Prohibition has owed its rapid
success in