What Prohibition Has Done to AmericaFranklin, Fabian
History
What Prohibition Has Done to America
Franklin, Fabian
Prohibition -- United States; United States. Constitution. 18th Amendment
nation, and imbedded permanently in the Constitution, it will have an
immeasurable effect in impairing that instinct of liberty which has
been the very heart of the American spirit; and with the loss of that
spirit will be lost the one great and enduring defense against
Socialism. It is not by the argumentation of economists, nor by the
calculations of statisticians, that the Socialist advance can be
halted. The real struggle will be a struggle not of the mind but of
the spirit; it will be Socialism and regimentation against
individualism and liberty. The cause of Prohibition has owed its rapid
success in no small measure to the support of great capitalists and
industrialists bent upon the absorbing object of productive
efficiency; but they have paid a price they little realize. For in the
attainment of this minor object, they have made a tremendous breach in
the greatest defense of the existing order of society against the
advancing enemy. To undermine the foundations of Liberty is to open
the way to Socialism.
CHAPTER XI
IS THERE ANY WAY OUT?
IN the second chapter of this book, I undertook to give an account of
the state of mind which the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has
created, and which is at the bottom of that contempt for the law whose
widespread prevalence among the best elements of our population is
acknowledged alike by prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists.
"People feel in their hearts," I said, "that they are confronted with
no other choice but that of either submitting to the full rigor of
Prohibition, of trying to procure a law which nullifies the
Constitution, or of expressing their resentment against an outrage on
the first principles of the Constitution by contemptuous disregard of
the law." It is a deplorable choice of evils; a state of things which
it is hardly too much to call appalling in its potentialities of civic
demoralization.
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