mand attention. It is enough to say that they
are reduced to minimising that document in defence of Prohibition,
exactly as the slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence of
Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers of the Republic
meant no more than that they would not be ruled by a king. And they are
obviously open to the reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery
question; that if that great charter was limited to certain events in
the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth making such a fuss about in
the nineteenth--or in the twentieth. But they are also open to another
reply which is even more to the point, when they pretend that
Jefferson's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy is wrong.
They are maintaining that Jefferson only meant to say something that he
does not say at all. The great preamble does not say that all
monarchical government must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies
that most government is right. It speaks of human governments in general
as justified by the necessity of defending certain personal rights. I
see no reason whatever to suppose that it would not include any royal
government that does defend those rights. Still less do I doubt what it
would say of a republican government that does destroy those rights.

But what are those rights? Sophists can always debate about their
degree; but even sophists cannot debate about their direction. Nobody in
his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the
law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more
general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty
can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at
least be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the first
liberties we lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right
place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the rights of man, if
they do not include the normal right to regulate his own health, in
relation to the normal risks of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend
that beer is a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions
of civilised men who drank it all fell down dead when they had touched
it. Its use and abuse is obviously a matter of judgment; and there can
be no personal liberty, if it is not a matter of private judgment. It
is not in the least a question of drawing the line between liberty and
licence. If this is licence, t