A law punishing drunkenness, which is a public nuisance, comes under the head I have been speaking of; a law forbidding a man to drink for fear that he may become a drunkard does not. And in fact the prohibitionists themselves instinctively recognize the difference, and avoid, so far as they can, offending the sense of liberty by so direct an attack upon it. It is safe to say that if the Eighteenth Amendment had undertaken to make the _drinking_ of liquor a crime, instead of the _manufacture and sale_ of it, it could not have been passed or come anywhere near being passed. There is hardly a Senator or a Representative that would not have recoiled from a proposal so palpably offensive to the instinct of liberty. Yet precisely this is the real object of the Eighteenth Amendment; its purpose and, if enforced, its practical effect is to make it permanently a crime against the national government for an American to drink a glass of beer or wine. The legislators, State and national, who enacted it knew this perfectly well; yet if the thing had been put into the Amendment in so many words, hardly a man of them would have cast his vote for it. The phenomenon is not so strange, or so novel, as it might seem; it has a standard prototype in the history of Rome. The Roman people had a rooted aversion and hostility to kings; and no Caesar would ever have thought of calling himself _rex_. But _imperator_ went down quite smoothly, and did just as well. In addition to its being a regulation of individual conduct in a matter which is in its nature the individual's own concern, Prohibition differs in another essential respect from those restrictions upon liberty which form a legitimate and necessary part of the operation of civil government. To put a governmental ban upon all alcoholic drinks is to forbid the _use_ of a thing in order to prevent its _abuse_. A Of course there are fanatics who declare--and believe--that _all_ indulgence in alcoholic drink, however moderate, is abuse; but to justify Prohibition on that ground would be to accept a doctrine even more dangerous to liberty. It is bad enough to justify the proscription of an innocent indulgence on the ground that there is danger of its being carried beyond the point of innocence; but it is far worse to forbid it on the ground that, however innocent and beneficial a moderate indulgence may seem to millions of people, it is not regarded as good for them by others. The only thing that lends dignity to the Prohibition cause is the undeniable fact that drunkenness is the source of a vast amount of evil and wretchedness; the position of those who declare that all objections must be waived in the presence of this paramount consideration is respectable, though in my judgment utterly wrong. But any man who justifies Prohibition on the ground that drinking is an evil, no matter how temperate, is either a man of narrow and stupid mind or is utterly blind to the value of human liberty. The