When will the hard-shelled prohibitionists understand that it is not drink _per se_ that thinking people are fighting for? The people are roused to action and alarm because of the dangerous precedent that has been set. If we, as a nation, are to be deprived of legitimate and friendly egg-nog (lovely word again!) when New Year comes round, why, in the name of heaven, can we not be deprived of eggs? They make one bilious, I am told. And biliousness is bad for one. Come, let us correct it. But, having taken away the dangerous egg, let us poke about and see what else one can remove. Ah! there it is, of course! Coffee! Coffee makes one nervous. Nervousness is awful. Coffee keeps one awake. But why remain awake in a world that has lost its glamour? Remove our coffee, then! Gladly we permit you to take it; for then we can go blissfully to sleep and forget our worries and cares. It has been loudly denied that lobbying is being done to bring about the passage of further drastic laws; but the busybodies are secretly working, night and day. The deadly work goes on, unabated. Of course they are not crying their methods from the housetops. Sinister forces are burrowing deep, and frightened legislators will be forced to follow the path they took before the Eighteenth Amendment went through. You remember that wonderfully satirical story of Mark Twain’s, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” don’t you, and what happened to a town that imposed righteousness upon the inhabitants? All temptation having been beneficently removed, when one little chance came to misbehave, the entire village leaped at it and was thoroughly corrupted. There is some fun in passing a saloon, in going voluntarily on the water-wagon, in refusing that extra cocktail; there is none whatever in having someone else do it for you. Our prayers may be dictated to us next. But something tells us that if prohibitionists formulate them, they have no more chance than ours of being heard in heaven. A world made safe for us by reformers is the last kind of world we care to dwell in. For reformers are the kind of people who paint heaven as a stupid city of golden streets and pearly gates, and incessant singing and playing of harps. Well, as Omar said, “thy heaven is not mine.” Prohibitionists, I am genuinely sorry for you. You need not pity me, for I shall go on doing as I please, despite you. And so will millions of other good Americans. Does that make you frantically desperate? Does that make you have another attack of your symptoms? Do you puff up with rage and despair when you hear me say such things in open defiance of you? Keeper, bring in the straitjacket, and sweep out, as Goldberg says, padded cell No. 7,894,502,431. For the pathological ward is overcrowded today. They have just brought in a frightfully red-faced man who believes in the Blue Laws; and he must have gone quite mad, for he is singing what he claims is the new national anthem, “Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blues!”