a
plebiscite, but equally without doubt a majority of them were against
the politicians so brutally clubbed by the Anti-Saloon League, and ready
to believe anything evil of them, and eager to see them manhandled.
Moreover, the League had another thing in its favour: it was operated by
strictly moral men, oblivious to any notion of honour. Thus it advocated
and procured the abolition of legalized liquor selling without the
slightest compensation to the men who had invested their money in the
business under cover of and even at the invitation of the law--a form of
repudiation and confiscation unheard of in any other civilized country.
Again, it got through the constitutional amendment by promising the
liquor men to give them one year to dispose of their lawfully
accumulated stocks--and then broke its promise under cover of alleged
war necessity, despite the fact that the war was actually over. Both
proceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honour, failed to arouse any
indignation among the plain people. On the contrary the plain people
viewed them as, in some vague way, smart and creditable, and as, in any
case, thoroughly justified by the superior moral obligation that we have
hitherto discussed.

Thus the _Boobus americanus_ is lead and watched over by zealous men,
all of them highly skilled at training him in the way that he should
think and act. The Constitution of his country guarantees that he shall
be a free man and assumes that he is intelligent, but the laws and
customs that have grown up under that Constitution give the lie to both
the guarantee and the assumption. It is the fundamental theory of all
the more recent American law, in fact, that the average citizen is
half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or
his own thoughts. If there were not regulations against the saloon (it
seems to say) he would get drunk every day, dissipate his means,
undermine his health and beggar his family. If there were not postal
regulations as to his reading matter, he would divide his time between
Bolshevist literature and pornographic literature and so become at once
an anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not forbidden under heavy
penalties to cross a state line with a wench, he would be chronically
unfaithful to his wife. Worse, if his daughter were not protected by
statutes of the most draconian severity, she would succumb to the first
Italian she encountered, yield up her person to him, enroll herse