hether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never denied that
there might need to be exceptional sacrifices for exceptional occasions;
and war is in its nature an exception. Only, if war is the exception,
why should Prohibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy
to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood ought to be
flowing for ever like a fountain in the public squares of Philadelphia
and New York. If my critic wants to complete his parallel, he must draw
up rather a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordinary
citizens. He must suppose that, through all their lives, they are
paraded every day at lunch time and prodded with bayonets to show that
they will shed their blood for their country. He must suppose that every
evening, after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are made
to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle of shell-fire. It
is surely obvious that if this were the normal life of the citizen, the
citizen would have no normal life. The common sense of the thing is that
sacrifices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not normal for
the State to be perpetually regulating our days with the discipline of a
fighting regiment; and it is not normal for the State to be perpetually
regulating our diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every
citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is like saying
that every Christian ought to tear himself with red-hot pincers because
the Christian martyrs did their duty in time of persecution. A man has a
right to control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may give his
body to be burned; and a man has a right to control his bodily health,
though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus,
though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that
comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that
Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ought to be eternal.

The other excuse is much less romantic and much more realistic. I have
already said enough of the cause which is really realistic. The real
power behind Prohibition is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing
employers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their workmen.
But before the progress of modern plutocracy had reached this stage,
there was a predetermining cause for which there was a much better case.
The whole business began with the problem of black labour.