The first is that
Prohibition was largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of
self-sacrifice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of America
in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, those who have any notion of
what that national unanimity was like will smile when they see America
made a model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was partly a
sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular instinct, like every
poetic instinct, always tends at great crises to great gestures of
renunciation. But this very fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more
human, makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot remain
standing stiffly in such symbolical attitudes; nor can a permanent
policy be founded on something analogous to flinging a gauntlet or
uttering a battle-cry. We might as well expect all the Yale students to
remain through life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when
they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable as to expect
them to remain through life with their mouths shut, while the wine-cup
which has been the sacrament of all poets and lovers passed round among
all the youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly in a
discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympathetic American critic,
a clergyman writing in an Anglo-Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment
of these healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with the
passing of Prohibition, by asking, 'May not a man who is asked to give
up his blood for his country be asked to give up his beer for his
country?' And this phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the
case. I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some abnormal
crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the beer, or to lock up the
bread. In that sense I am quite prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer
in the same way as the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic
really ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as the
sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged and protracted as
Prohibition? Is the normal noncombatant to shed his gore as often as he
misses his drink? I can imagine people submitting to a special
regulation, as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do
indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately passes drink
regulations as war measures and then preserves them as peace measures.
But that is not a question of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong,
but of w