The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: The Human Side of What the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act Have Done to the United StatesTowne, Charles Hanson
History
The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: The Human Side of What the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act Have Done to the United States
Towne, Charles Hanson
Prohibition -- United States; United States. Constitution. 18th Amendment
“This can only be done by modifying the law so as to make it
conform with the Bible. If the law is dishonest, cruel or unjust,
we must vote to change it if we love God, and love our neighbor and
love the common weal. We must either repeal it altogether or amend
it, so as to make it honest, kindly and fair, so that we may have
law and liberty at the same time.
“And Americans will do it. In the immortal words of Daniel Webster:
‘If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it
will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth’s
central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may
overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and
unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at
some time or other, in some place or other, it will break out and
flame up to heaven.’”
This is powerful language which strikes at the very root of things, but
Dr. Crawford-Frost is not the only fearless clergyman who has spoken
his mind on this all-absorbing question. Archbishop Glennon, of St.
Louis, has scored the Eighteenth Amendment. In an interview given at
Atlantic City in August, 1922, he bravely said:
“The Constitution has been considerably weakened by the addition of
the Eighteenth Amendment, for the Prohibition clause limits rights,
while the rest of the Constitution grants rights. Matters referring
to alcohol and drugs should be left to the police courts of the
various cities and states.”
When he was asked if he thought Prohibition a benefit to the country,
he said:
“For those who drink too much, yes.”
The Most Reverend James Duhig, D.D., Archbishop of Brisbane, Australia,
interviewed in New York, in the late summer of 1922, deplored the
dry law. He admitted that he had not observed any drunken men in the
streets of the metropolis, but that fact, he said, was beside the
issue, because it was the principle of Prohibition with which he took
issue. He said:
“In Australia they are against Prohibition. I myself have written
strongly against it, and all that I have been able to learn of the
results of it in the United States has only served to confirm my
belief that Australia has taken the right view.
“Australia was amazed at America going dry. You cannot make men
sober by an act of Parliament. What we need is a reasonable control
of the liquor trade, not its total abolition. Extremes are always
dangerous, and I consider Prohibition an extreme course.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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