‘That is not badly conceived, Phaelon,’ said I, ‘but I am afraid we cannot take it as an explanation. In the first place the nations of Europe do not at all need to be warned, by example or otherwise against teetotalism, and, secondly, the Americans are not at all a nation of teetotallers.’ ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that the rich can drink and do.’ ‘Not the rich only, but all who will take a little trouble,’ I answered. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘is it possible that this law has been imposed not to make teetotallers, but for the sake of the bribes of those who wish to break it?’ ‘Not so,’ I answered, ‘for it costs the Americans a great deal of money to make this change in the way men drink. They employ many more policemen than before and if there is a bribe it is these men who keep it and not the State, and though the State gains something from the fines it imposes, yet it loses a great deal more by not being able to tax wine and the other drinks.’ Hereupon Lysis exclaimed: ‘Then what is the real reason for such strange goings on. For my part, I believe they prohibit drinks by law in order to give an added flavour or zest to their drinking. For forbidden fruit is sweet to taste.’ ‘For the same reason, in fact,’ said Agathon, ‘that they mix different drinks together, to get more stimulus. So that we may say that Prohibition and cocktails spring from the same source.’ ‘That explanation and the others, my worthy friends,’ I said, ‘may help us to understand why so many are resigned to the privation. But very different is the true cause why they have poured out so vast a libation to Efficiency.’ ‘Explain it, then,’ said they all. ‘Did we not agree earlier,’ I answered, ‘that in America the State does many things that are not for its own good, and that are not done in the interests of the State itself, but that rich and energetic minorities could use the machinery of representative government to make their own will appear as the will of the State?’ ‘Indeed, yes,’ they said. ‘And truly,’ said Agathon, ‘and when he said earlier that the combination of the manufacturers and the preachers could never be resisted, I thought at once of this Prohibition.’ ‘It seemed to the interests of those two classes and the women,’ I said, ‘and they brought it about. But such men commonly cannot judge what is to their own advantage. For the preachers are men who have chosen for themselves the task of moral leadership, and have commonly great earnestness and little else. You know, Lysis, that the preachers are those who have separated themselves from the priests and the old religious traditions? Indeed it was largely by such preachers and their close followers that the first colonies were founded in America.’ ‘The priests themselves,’ said Lysis, ‘are surely not enemies to drink.’ ‘By Hercules, no,’ I said. ‘That means much,’ said Agathon.