ol and in regulation of
desires are concerned, the result must be dangerous, because, on the
whole, it eliminates the mild beverages in favor of the strong drinks
and substitutes lonely drinking for drinking in social company. Both
are psychologically and physiologically a turn to the worse. It is not
the mild beer and light wine which are secretly imported; it is much
easier to transport and hide whiskey and rum, with their strong
alcoholic power and stronger effect on the nerve-cells of the brain.
And of all forms of drinking none is more ruinous than the solitary
drink, as soon as the feeling of repugnance has been overcome; there
is no limit and no inhibition. If I look back over the last years, in
which I often studied the effects of suggestion and hypnotism on
habitual drinkers, I do not hesitate to say that it was in most cases
an easy thing to cure the social drinker of the large cities, but very
hard to break the lonely drinker of the temperance town. Of course,
prohibition reduces somewhat the whole quantity of consumption, but it
withdraws the stimulant, in most cases, where it would do the least
harm and intensifies the harm to the organism where it is most
dangerous.

_Our Greatest Danger--Disregard for Law_

But man is not only a nervous system. Prohibition forced by a majority
on an unwilling minority will always remain a living source of the
spirit of disregard for law. Yet, "unwilling" minority is too weak an
epithet; the question is of a minority which considers the arbitrary
rule undemocratic, absurd, immoral, and which really believes that it
is justified in finding a way around a contemptible law.

Judges know how rapidly the value of the oath sinks in courts where
violation of the prohibition laws is a frequent charge, and how
habitual perjury becomes tolerated by respected people. The city
politicians know still better how closely blackmail and corruption
hang together, in the social psychology, with the enforcement of laws
that strike against the beliefs and traditions of wider circles. The
public service becomes degraded, the public conscience becomes dulled.
And can there be any doubt that disregard of law is the most dangerous
psychological factor in our present-day American civilization? It is
not lynch law which is the worst; the crimes against life are twenty
times more frequent than in Europe, and as for the evils of commercial
life which have raised the wrath of the whole well-meanin