The story from Washington, where the wets have been trying to persuade congress to loosen the laws against liquor, is not comforting to the campaigners, for congress has shown a decided attitude in favor of the dry amendment. And congress sis right. Where whiskey a personal matter as the wets undertake to argue, it would be entirely different, but the prohibition of liquor is to more a sumptuary law than the prohibition of burglar tools or poison or any other thing that is in itself presumptive evidence of danger to society and other individuals. If the man who wants to get drunk would get drunk and not molest any one else no law would have a right to protect him from his own folly. But the great difficulty is that the man who gets drunk is at once a public danger and the easiest way to protect society form him is to keep him sober and responsible. The general belief that whiskey makes a man dangerous and not himself is the excuse offered in court very often that the criminal was not responsible for his crime because he was drunk.
The people of this country have removed much of the menace of whisky. It is infinitely safer to drive the roads today because whiskey is so largely removed from general use. With open saloons where liquor could be had indiscriminately the automobile in drunken hands would be a pestilence and worse than war. In any line if whiskey will prevail society would be at the mercy of the drunken man. It is nonsense to say drunkenness is as bad as before prohibition, for that is entirely wrong. May a young chap in these days has never seen a drunken man, wile 15 years ago they were plentiful everywhere. And the bulk of the people will never allow such a condition to prevail again.
Nobody wants to ride on trains again hauled by engineers who have been drinking, nor to have a doctor called who is in the worse for the last drink, nor to have any service from any one who is intoxicated, as was often the case in the past. Nobody wants to ride in a bus driven by a man who is drunk, nor to have a drunken man around the shop or the factory, or any place where he endangers the others. Society is leery of whisky now, and because it is a menace to others than the man who drinks it. Business men do not want their customers to be spending their money at the gin mills. The truth is might few want whisky, because it is a too expensive constant danger, and that is why John Barleycorn will never be resurrected.
From the editorial page of The Pilot, Southern Pines, N.C., Friday May 7, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073968/1926-05-07/ed-1/seq-4/
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