ardent old-time Prohibitionist--the man who thinks, however mistakenly, that the abolition of intoxicating drinks means the salvation of mankind--counts the impairment of liberty as a small matter in comparison with his world-saving reform; this is a position from which one cannot withhold a certain measure of sympathy and respect. But to justify the sacrifice of liberty on the ground that the man who is deprived of it will be somewhat better off without it is to assume a position that is at once contemptible and in the highest degree dangerous. Contemptible, because it argues a total failure to understand what liberty means to mankind; dangerous, because there is no limit to the monstrosities of legislation which may flow from the acceptance of such a view. Esau _sold_ his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage which he wanted; these people would rob us of our birthright and by way of compensation thrust upon us a mess of pottage for which we have no desire. Rejecting, then, the preposterous notion of extreme fanatics--whether the fanatics of science or the fanatics of moral reform--we have in Prohibition a restraint upon the liberty of the individual which is designed not to protect the rights of other individuals or to serve the manifest requirements of civil government, but to prevent the individual from injuring himself by pursuing his own happiness in his own way; the case being further aggravated by the circumstance that in order to make this injury impossible he is denied even such access to the forbidden thing as would not--except in a sense that it is absurd to consider--be injurious. Now this may be benevolent despotism, but despotism it is; and the people that accustoms itself to the acceptance of such despotism, whether at the hands of a monarch, or an oligarchy, or a democracy, has abandoned the cause of liberty. For there is hardly any conceivable encroachment upon individual freedom which would be a more flagrant offense against that principle than is one that makes an iron-bound rule commanding a man to conform his personal habits to the judgment of his rulers as to what is best for him. I do not mean to assert that it necessarily follows that such encroachments will actually come thick and fast on the heels of Prohibition. Any specific proposal will, of course, be opposed by those who do not like it, and may have a much harder time than Prohibition to acquire the following necessary to bring about its adoption. But the resistance to it on specific grounds will lack the strength which it would derive from a profound respect for the general principle of liberty; whatever else may be said against it, it will be impossible to make good the objection that it sets an evil precedent of disregard for the claims of that principle. The Eighteenth Amendment is so gross an instance of such disregard that it can hardly be surpassed by anything that is at all likely to be proposed. And if the establishment of that precedent