lways rule the Celt. We tell a populace whose very virtues are lawless
that together we uphold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own
law-abiding character in people who make laws that neither they nor
anybody else can abide. We congratulate them on clinging to all they
have cast away, and on imitating everything which they came into
existence to insult. And when we have established all these nonsensical
analogies with a nonexistent nation, we wait until there is a crisis in
which we really are at one with America, and then we falter and threaten
to fail her. In a battle where we really are of one blood, the blood of
the great white race throughout the world, when we really have one
language, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the script of Rome,
when we really do represent the same reign of law, the common conscience
of Christendom and the morals of men baptized, when we really have an
implicit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon up our souls as
with trumpets--_then_ many of us begin to weaken and waver and wonder
whether there is not something very nice about little yellow men, whose
heroic stories revolve round polygamy and suicide, and whose heroes wore
two swords and worshipped the ancestors of the Mikado.

_Prohibition in Fact and Fancy_

I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I
soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss
it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to
dispense with the nuts. I am far from sneering at this; having a general
philosophy which need not here be expounded, but which may be symbolised
by saying that monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. But
if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of the first thing
to be said about it. The first thing to be said about it is that it does
not exist. It is to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it
was intended to be enforced among the poor; though even among them I
fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced among the rich;
and I doubt whether it was intended to be. I suspect that this has
always happened whenever this negative notion has taken hold of some
particular province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never has
in history; not even in Moslem history; and it never will. Mahomet at
least had the argument of a climate and not the interest of a class. But
if a test is needed, consider what part