g nation in
late years, has not disregard of law been their real source? In a
popular melodrama the sheriff says solemnly: "I stand here for the
law"; and when the other shouts in reply, "I stand for common sense!"
night after night the public breaks out into jubilant applause. To
foster this immoral negligence of law by fabricating hasty,
ill-considered laws in a hysterical mood, laws which almost tempt
toward a training in violation of them, is surely a dangerous
experiment in social psychology.

_Are We About to Prohibit Meat and Tea?_

Hasty and hysterical that kind of law-making is indeed. Within a few
years, during which the situation itself has not been changed, during
which no new discoveries have proved the right or necessity, during
which no experts have reached common results, the wave has swollen
to a devastating flood. Who let it loose? Were the psychologists
asked to decide, or the physicians, or the physiologists, or the
sociologists, or any one who has studied the problem as a whole with
professional knowledge? Certainly not: their commissions have hardly
ever proposed total abstinence. Of course, those who rush on mean the
best as they see it; they want to make better men; but can a
nation ever hope to reach private morality by law and thus to
exclude all private lying and greediness and envy and ingratitude
and temper and unfairness just as well as intemperance? Such unclear
and vague mixing of purposes always characterizes hysterical
legislation. A sober contemplator must ask himself: What is it to
lead to if well-meaning, short-sighted dilettantes can force
legislation on questions which demand the most serious expert study?

There is growing throughout the land to-day a conviction--which has
its core of truth--that many people eat too much meat; and not a few
see a remedy in vegetarianism and Fletcherism. If this prejudice
swells in a similar way, the time may come when one State after the
other will declare slaughtering illegal, confiscate the meat-packing
houses, and prohibit the poisonous consumption of beef and the killing
of any creature that can look on us with eyes. Other groups are
fighting coffee and tea, and we may finally land in nuts and salads.
Yes, according to this line of legislative wisdom, there is no reason
for prohibiting only alcohol. Do I go far beyond the facts in
asserting that in certain States the same women and men who are
publicly against every use of alcohol are al