And so it is with the basic principles of legislation. To forbid the use of narcotic drugs is a restraint of liberty of the same _kind_ as to forbid the use of alcoholic liquors; but in _degree_ the two are wide as the poles asunder. The use of narcotic drugs (except as medicine) is so unmitigatedly harmful that there is perhaps hardly a human being who contends that it is otherwise. People _crave_ it, but they are ashamed of the craving. It plays no part in any acknowledged form of human intercourse; it is connected with no joys or benefits that normal human beings openly prize. A thing which is so wholly evil, and which, moreover, so swiftly and insidiously renders powerless the will of those who--perhaps by some accident--once begin to indulge in it, stands outside the category alike of the ordinary objects of human desire and the ordinary causes of human degradation. To make an exception to the principle of liberty in such a case is to do just what common sense dictates in scores of instances where the strict application of a general principle to extreme cases would involve an intolerable sacrifice of good in order to remove a mere superficial appearance of wrong. To make the prohibition of narcotic drugs an adequate reason for not objecting to the prohibition of alcoholic drinks would be like calling upon physicians to throw into the scrap heap their principle of the absolute sanctity of human life because they do not apply that principle with literal rigor in cases where to do so would be an act of inhuman and unmitigated cruelty. CHAPTER X PROHIBITION AND SOCIALISM