rior. The American politicians
dared not disfranchise the negroes; so they coerced everybody in theory
and only the negroes in practice. The drinking of the white men became
as much a conspiracy as the shooting by the white horsemen of the
Ku-Klux Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in passing that
the comparison illustrates the idiocy of supposing that the moral sense
of mankind will ever support the prohibition of drinking as if it were
something like the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is
liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible form; as when
private bravos were hired to kill workmen in the capitalistic interests
of that pure patron of disarmament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich
Americans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered with,
because they are only using up their existing stocks of wine, we may
well be disposed to smile. When I was there, at any rate, they were
using them up very fast; and with no apparent fears about the supply.
But if the Ku-Klux Klan had started suddenly shooting everybody they
didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly explained that they were
only using up the stocks of their ammunition, left over from the Civil
War, it seems probable that there would at least have been a little
curiosity about how much they had left. There might at least have been
occasional inquiries about how long it was likely to go on. It is even
conceivable that some steps might have been taken to stop it.

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, chiefly because
the rich now make all the rules and therefore all the exceptions, but
partly because nobody ever could feel the full moral seriousness of this
particular rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was
originally established as an exception and not as a rule. The
emancipated negro was an exception in the community, and a certain plan
was, rightly or wrongly, adopted to meet his case. A law was made
professedly for everybody and practically only for him. Prohibition is
only important as marking the transition by which the trick, tried
successfully on black labour, could be extended to all labour. We in
England have no right to be Pharisaic at the expense of the Americans in
this matter; for we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The
true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of the poor would be
to say frankly that we have ruled them so badly that they