result is too often an hysterical zig-zag
movement, where fearlessness might have found a middle way of steady
progress. There must be indeed a possible middle way between the evil
of the present saloon and the not lesser evil of a future national
prohibition; yet if this one-sidedness of discussion goes on, it is
not difficult to foresee, after the legislative experiences of the
last year, that the hysterical movement will not stop until
prohibition is proclaimed from every state-house between the Atlantic
and the Pacific.

Exaggerated denunciation of the prohibition movement is, of course,
ineffective. Whoever simply takes sides with the saloon-keeper and his
clientele--yes, whoever is blind to the colossal harm which alcohol
has brought and is now bringing to the whole country--is unfit to be
heard by those who have the healthy and sound development of the
nation at heart. The evils which are connected with the drinking habit
are gigantic; thousands of lives and many more thousands of households
are the victims every year; disease and poverty and crime grow up
where alcohol drenches the soil. To deny it means to ignore the
teachings of medicine and economics and criminology.

But is this undeniable fact really a proof of the wisdom of
prohibition? The railroads of the United States injured last year more
than one hundred thousand persons and put out seven thousand hopeful
lives; does any sane man argue that we ought to abolish railroads? The
stock exchange has brought in the last year economic misery to
uncounted homes, but even at the height of the panic no one wanted to
destroy the market for industrial stocks. How much crime and disaster
and disease and ruin have come into the lives of American youth
through women, and yet who doubts that women are the blessing of the
whole national life? To say that certain evils come from a certain
source suggests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source
before studying whether greater evils might not result from its
destruction, and without asking whether the evils might not be
reduced, and the good from the same source remain untouched and
untampered with. Even if a hollow tooth aches, the modern dentist does
not think of pulling it; that would be the remedy of the clumsy
village barber. The evils of drink exist, and to neglect their cure
would be criminal, but to rush on to the conclusion that every
vineyard ought therefore to be devastated is unworthy of the logi