CHAPTER VII.EPILOGUE ON PROHIBITION.
I have deliberately left out of the imaginary discussion with which the last chapter closes, any reference to Prohibition. Had the scholastic pressed this point, as an instance of religious persecution by law, the American must have been forced to treat the Prohibition movement as an exception, a parasitic growth which has fastened itself upon the Constitution. He would then have had trouble in sustaining the argument. In the world of shades, or in any other place where there is time to pare down matters to their essentials, the determining factor of religious persecution in the Prohibition movement must be admitted.
As has been stated in the preface, it was the shock of recognizing this fact (through contact with Prohibition agitators during a term of service in the New York State Assembly) which led the present writer to study the establishment of the Inquisition as the one comparable instance of so drastic an interference of religion with politics. In all the long story of Christendom there is no third instance of religious persecution so systematic or on such a scale. The foregoing study was at first undertaken in the belief of the writer that the mere account of the political and military struggle leading up to the establishment of the Inquisition would, by itself, be enough to enable the reader to see for himself the true nature of “Prohibition.” However, during the unavoidable delays of the last few years, this original belief has now been abandoned. As a result of many conversations on the subject, the writer now believes that the real forces responsible for Prohibition are sufficiently misunderstood, especially among Protestants, as to make it desirable to show in an epilogue the essential connection between sectarian Protestantism and Prohibition, the truenature of Prohibition as sectarian-Protestant, religious persecution, and finally, the resemblance and divergencies between Prohibition and the thirteenth century Inquisition.
When written history begins, all civilized and semi-civilized people, and many savages besides, are found drinking some sort of fermented liquor, wine, cider, or one of the many kinds of beer. Back of written history, tradition has it that the practice was from immemorial time. No people had handed down a story of an early past when such liquor was not an integral and familiar part of each day’s diet, usually with meals. It is true that the Greeks said that Bacchus-Dionysus came from Asia, bringing the Vine, the youngest of the Gods, and that some scholars have held that this indicated the memory of a time when the primitive Greeks were wineless wretches. The argument, however, will not hold water. For, in the first place, even if we imagine an early time before the Greeks drank wine, there is nothing to prove that they did not know some other sort of fermented stuff, as the Gauls did before Rome conquered them. And, furthermore, people in the Iliad and Odyssey drink wine but seem to know nothing of its God; it was familiar but it was not yet holy.
Besides being everywhere, fermented liquor was everywhere used in much the same way. It was an article of daily diet, so much so that no meal was complete without it. At feasts and festivals it was drunk more freely. Drunkenness was extremely rare. The Old Testament assumes that people had to “rise up early in the morning” and “continue until night” before wine would “inflame them,”[37]and denounces those persistent enough to do so. It was the Greek custom to mix their wine with water, several parts of water to one of wine. Schliemann speaks of an inscription recording a law of one of the Ionian cities which prescribes penalties for drinking neat wine. One of the early Babylonian codes of law prescribes severe penalties against the keeper of any wine shop (an Englishman would call him a “publican,” an American a “saloon keeper”) in which a disturbance occurs. The reader should be warned, however,that the danger of disturbance was no doubt quite as much due at that early time to the presence of numbers of men not known to one another, as it was to the drinking that went on there. At all events, the Hebrew and the Greek examples are enough to prove the attitude of the earliest historical time toward the instances of drunkenness (apparently rare) which they saw. No sooner had the keen Greek mind developed itself and begun to analyse than it laid down the general principle of temperance as one of the chief virtues. In the particular case of fermented drinks which we are now considering, Belloc has neatly remarked that “It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined.”[38]So much for the historical background.
Given the ancient use everywhere of fermented drinks, given also the recognition of the rare evil of habitual drunkenness, it is instructive to note that before the sixteenth century there is (with one exception) no record of the habitual use of distilled liquors in Europe and the Near East, and (again with one exception) no record of the idea of the sinfulness of drink.
First as to distilled liquors. Distillation of beverages was known in ancient China. The earliest European navigators to visit Tahiti found it practised by the savages there, which would indicate the probability of its great antiquity in that stagnant, primitive society. The word alcohol itself is of Arabic origin, like many similar words, such asalembic,algebra, &c. The sweet, aromatic, liqueurs made by mediæval monks (Benedictine by the Benedictines, Chartreuse by the Carthusians, &c.), are hardly exceptions to the rule inasmuch as they are essentially cordials rather than beverages. Brandy (burnt-wine, brant wine, brandevin, brandy wine) was known in France from the fourteenth century but seems to have been drunk chiefly as a cordial, as it still is in that country to-day. At all events, the scanty references to it indicate that it was little used. The one considerable exception is the use of whisky (usquebaugh, pronounced whiskybaw) among the highland Scotch and the Irish.With these people whisky was traditional. The ancient Irish epics of Cuchulain and Finn are full of references to it, as the Homeric poems of references to wine. While the debate over the date of the Irish epics may cheerfully be left to specialists, it is certainly clear that they long antedate the sixteenth century. Like wine, beer, and cider among the other nations of Europe, whisky among the Irish certainly dates from before the commencement of written history. But, in Europe, before the sixteenth century, to Ireland and the Scotch highlands its use was confined.
That the use of fermented liquors was sinful was an unknown idea, quite as unknown as we have seen the use of distilled liquors to have been. Previous to the sixteenth century, we find ascetic individuals or select orders renouncing wine, but always, like true ascetics, either with the idea of making their abstention a distinguishing mark, or with that of renouncing pleasures lawful or even necessary to the community at large for the sake of special practice in self-control. Thus among the ancient Hebrews certain men would dedicate themselves to be “Nazarites to the Lord,” and as such would vow never to drink wine or to cut the hair or beard. The wine cup was no more evil than the scissors, abstention from both was merely the distinctive sign of a peculiar dedication. Just so, ascetic Christians would renounce wine except in the sacrament; St. Dominic is an instance. He was teetotal for years, although he finally gave up the practice. Here the idea was that of complete devotion to the service of God. Even entirely lawful and proper pleasures were to be freely laid aside by an individual in order that all fleshy desires, as such, might be “mortified,” and that the soul should not risk being swerved even by a hair’s breadth (through an instant’s delight in “creatures”) from complete and utter devotion to the Creator. Ascetic Christians were even more apt to give up eating meat than drinking wine. And, of course, none but the most frantically heretical Christians ever maintained that there was anything sinful about eating meat as such. Such renunciations were merely two among many forms of self-imposed “discipline.” In the same spirit a devout layman, like St. Louis, might abstain from marital intercourse duringLent. Apart from the practice of a general asceticism, the ancient and the mediæval worlds knew of but one great example of fear and hatred for wine. That appalling exception was the doctrine of Mohammed.
Within Christendom itself, however, the theological and moral influence of Islam was slight. The only one of the various Mohammedan innovations in morals which had even a brief and partial echo among Christian men was the Prophet’s prohibition of images. With regard to the point under discussion, the use of wine, Mohammed’s teaching failed to commend itself to our ancestors. Instructed in Christian tradition, with the marriage in Cana and with the sacrament continually before them, the teetotaller fanaticism took no hold upon them. The chroniclers speak of it merely as an oddity, like the Jewish taboo against pork—which the Mohammedans also copied.
So matters stood until the great sixteenth century break with tradition. When the convulsions of the religious wars had ceased, Scandinavia, the Northern Germanies including Holland, and especially England, were seen in definite opposition to what was left of the moral unity of Europe. The break was different in degree, for England preserved the essential catholicity of her national Church, although well-nigh smothered under a mass of Protestant innovations, whereas the Northern Germanies lapsed altogether. Nevertheless at the time the break seemed final in England as well. There had been no such sharp change of direction, no such conscious rejection of the immediate past, since Constantine accepted the Faith. It might even be said that the sixteenth century break was the greater of the two, for the sixteenth century innovators despised their ancestors as the early Christians had never despised the pagans. With the theological debates which determined this capital change we are not here concerned for their own sake, but only for the effect which the acceptance of the Protestant dogmas produced upon the morals and therefore, in the end, upon the social structure of Christendom.
The Catholic possessed and, of course, still possesses an inclusive, reasoned, scheme of ethical teaching. This ethical scheme had been taken over by the Church fromthe ancient Greeks, and especially from Aristotle. To the Aristotelian ethic had been added (like a superstructure which enlarges rather than disturbs the original design of a building) the Christian theological virtues and their attendant vices. Under this broad scheme, serious moral offences were classified under one or another of the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth and lust.
This ethical structure, composed jointly by the Greek genius and the Christian revelation, Protestantism has so destroyed that the average Protestant of to-day, even when educated, cannot so much as tell what the seven deadly sins may be. Few Protestants, if forced to think by Socratic questions, will fail to agree as to the reality of all seven. Nevertheless, in practice, Protestants have ceased to consider most of them as sins at all. Let the reader who may be inclined to doubt so sweeping a pronouncement merely take the trouble to question a few of his friends. If he prefers to approach the matter through general rather than particular instances, let him consider for a moment the industrial society of to-day, together with the universal and bitter quarrel between “capital” and “labor” which has arisen in that society. Then let him remember that modern industrialism had its birth in England—a country Protestant in manners and morals where the essentially Catholic character of the national Church itself has been so much ignored and misunderstood. Let him further remember that, outside of England, the industrial system has taken deepest root in the Protestant Northern Germanies and in the Protestant United States. In spite of its material success, it has been but partially imitated in Catholic countries from these Protestant models. After reviewing these obvious and indisputable facts, let him recall that for centuries not one out of a hundred Protestants, even among the educated, has ever been clearly told that such things as avarice, sloth, and envy are sins. Then let him deny, if he can, the ruin that Protestantism has made in what was once the symmetric structure of Christian morals.
In place of inclusive, reasoned, ethical principles, the Protestant set up fragmentary taboos. On account of his rejection of Christian tradition, he was driven to buildupon the Scriptures alone. In none of the canonical books could he find the ethical principles of the New Testament, with their implications, built up into a coordinated manual of ethics. Moreover, the early, formative Protestants vastly preferred the Old Testament which showed the ancient Jews in the taboo stage of morals, to the specifically Christian traditions of the historic Church. Taboo is the stage in which morals are not a matter of reasoned general principles of conduct, but consist merely of disconnected prohibitions of specific acts. Of course, Catholicism has its taboos, such as abstinence from meat on Fridays, but these are marks of distinctive religious observance rather than general rules of conduct. In his Bible, which he had stripped naked of tradition, the Protestant found the ancient Jewish taboos impressively codified, by contrast with the Christian principles scattered through the New Testament. With his profession of Christianity, his rejection of Christian tradition, and his intimate admiration for the ancient Jews, his ethical course was clear. That part of Catholic morals which was not capable of expression in hard and fast taboos he would not actually disown but would gradually allow to be forgotten. So it has been with reference to avarice and envy, for example. Accordingly we see the great prizes of power and social distinction awarded as the result of successful avarice in the pursuit of wealth; envy rampant, and sloth unashamed both in the “ca-canny” labourer who restricts his output, and in the rich who are no longer held by custom to perform any service or duty in return for the economic power lodged in them. On the other hand Protestantism concentrates its moral fervour upon the element in traditional Christian morals which can be even approximated through taboos. Hence illicit sexual intercourse and excess in eating and drinking are particularly condemned. As time went on, since the ill effects of over-eating were less immediately obvious than those of drunkenness, this last has come to stand alone with adultery and fornication as the targets for Protestant moral attack. To-day educated Protestants will sometimes tell you that a Christian life consists chiefly in refraining from women other than one’s wife and from drink!
Of course this attitude is a reversal of the soundEuropean tradition which thought of the sins springing from an excess of natural sensual desire as far less repellent than the mean and despicable sins, culminating in treachery, which derive from a perversion of man’s spiritual nature.
But Protestantism went even further than this. At its very beginning, Luther, in his “Address to the German Nobility” (A.D.1520), had proposed the non-observance of “... All saints’ days,with their carousing, except Sundays.” And no sooner had Protestantism reached its most highly developed form, under Calvin, than it began an organized warfare against popular festivals and all the decorative side of life. The zealots who were its spear-point conceived the idea that God could be worshipped only with the mind. To quote Chesterton on Puritanism (the English form of Calvinism): “It is better to worship in a barn than in a cathedral, for the specific reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship.... Therefore it is wicked to worship by ... dancing, or drinking sacramental wines, or building beautiful churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep.”[39]
Naturally, in the absolute divorce of beauty and holiness, it was to be expected that beauty must be thought essentially evil. Moreover, with such a system, it was necessary for the Puritans not only to get rid of beauty but also to do away with amusement so that (out of working hours) the people might have nothing to do but contemplate their theology and seek confirmation of it in their Bibles.
Of course, so bald and repulsive a fanaticism seeking to impose its tyranny upon Christian men could not, by itself, have made its way. Even the anger then running throughout Europe at the scandal given by ecclesiastical authority would have been insufficient as a cloak for such enormities. But behind the zealots were the mercantile class, into whose lap the adventurers were already beginning to pour the gold of the Indies. These “economic men” saw their chance. The masses, with their festivalsand their pleasures taken from them, would not only have more time to listen to sermons, they would also have more time to work. For it was beginning to be the unspoken creed of these men that the poor man, who must gain his bread in the sweat of his brow, existed mainly that they might “get rich quick.” With their influence, the merchants furnished the driving force behind the fanatics. In England Protestantism was not long in developing into Puritanism under the powerful influence of Calvin whose God, as Wesley said, had the exact functions and attributes of the Devil.
Inspired by such a divinity, the Puritans began operations. The theatre, dancing, card playing, &c., were abhorrent to them. Moreover, and here is the essence of the whole matter, they accounted it righteousness to do their best to compel other men, indifferent or hostile to their extraordinary beliefs, to live after their sombre fashion. To the black shame of Puritanism, with its glorification of private judgment, it has never been content when in power with telling its votaries to practise its own peculiar kind of righteousness and leave others to their own consciences. In this, as in many things, the Puritan is closer in spirit to the Mohammedan than he is to the historic Church. Indeed the correspondencies between Puritanism and Mohammedans, with respect to images, ceremonies, divorce, drink, &c., deserve more study than they have received. At its utmost, the Church has claimed jurisdiction only over those of the household of faith. Puritanism seeks to impose its taboos even upon the stranger within its gates.
Puritanism contains, furthermore, an essential element of hypocrisy. To a certain extent this is due to its founder Calvin himself. For auricular confession under secrecy, or for the general confession, he could only substitute the activities of “... good men ... to be chosen from the different quarters of the city whose duty was to report evil doers to the ministers, for admonishment or exclusion from the Supper” ...[40]meaning the sacrament. Comment on such a smelling committee is needless.
Besides, the typical Puritan hypocrisy is derived from the prominence of the mercantile element present in Puritanism from the first. A wealthy man advocating Puritan taboos in order to promote asceticism among his workmen may or may not profess Puritanism, but he very seldom feels called upon to live up to it himself. Of course, with the command of privacy which wealth gives, it is easy for him to avoid open scandal.
In addition to the inveterate Puritan habit of setting members of a congregation to spy upon one another, and second, the prominence which Puritanism gives to economic motives as seen by the merchant or trader, there is also a third cause making for hypocrisy among the Puritans. That is the influence of reason (in alliance with the dimly-felt inheritance of centuries of Catholicism) demonstrating the insignificance of the transgressions which it is Puritanism’s great effort to reprove, in comparison with the baser sins. Therefore, we find many Puritans who are essentially decent people and useful members of society, all the time slyly violating the taboos, such as the drink taboo, to which they subscribe in words. Certainly all societies and religions have their hypocrites, but as certainly the hypocrisy of Puritanism excels them all.
It may be objected that it is far-fetched to assign sixteenth century Protestantism (with its English development of Puritanism) as the cause of twentieth century industrial strife. Why then did not the industrial strife develop sooner, more particularly why did it not develop in the times when the Protestant philosophy (or, if the reader prefer, the Protestant “dogma”) was far more lucidly and more intensely held? In any case, how can a system set up largely by merchants and traders be held to have caused the envy and sloth which cause and accompany our industrial strife?
The answer is that Protestantism happened to appear just at the beginning of the modern increased command over nature which for three hundred years has gone on opening up new lands for colonization and at the same time has improved the technique of agriculture and increased the quantity of the products of industry. All this has resulted in three centuries of increasing expansion unparalleled in history. At the beginning of thisperiod the Protestant dogma had been established, to the effect that a man’s private judgment in matters of religion was superior to corporate religious authority. Inevitably, such teaching bred loneliness in the soul. But, for the most part, men still felt themselves to be members one of another, because the continuous expansion had lightened the pressure of competition between classes and individuals. Any man in the more thickly settled regions who might be dissatisfied with his lot saw the frontier beckoning. Expansion, as in the twelfth century, made for a buoyant temper in the mind, but, unlike that of the twelfth century, this temper was too contemptuous of the past (because of the sixteenth century break with tradition and also because the expansion was without precedent); whereas the twelfth and thirteenth centuries felt that they were only partly reconquering the Roman order. Hence the naive faith in “progress” as such, which culminated in the late nineteenth century, and the equally naive illusion that physical science of itself would somehow make for happiness.
Although the full effect of the evil has been postponed to our own day, nevertheless the indictment against modern industrialism is not new. Scarcely had the so-called “industrial revolution” ushered in the superlative degree of the evil spreading outward from the Protestant societies dominant in our world before the seamy side of the business was shown up. In nineteenth century England (the parent and, until yesterday, the centre of the system) industrialism was ably attacked by such men as Dickens, Ruskin, and William Morris. Still the protests were not effective in that, despite them, complacency remained the typical mood of the Victorian Age. The resulting destructive political movements and the strikes were already drearily familiar before 1900. Protestantism, in breaking down the corporate religious ties which made men members one of another, had released destructive forces in human nature which were beyond control. Incidentally, the action of these forces was precisely contrary to the “economic” intentions present in the mind of so many early Protestants! Before 1914 it was apparent that matters were becoming serious, and now the strain of the Great War has so increased the industrial friction inherent in our societythat such friction has become the chief problem confronting civilization.
Although the pressing nature of the problem of our chronic industrial civil war is now abundantly recognized, the nature of the problem itself is still incorrectly diagnosed. The “industrial revolution” is generally given as the root of the trouble, whereas the industrial revolution merely watered the evil seed sown broadcast by the sixteenth century moral change in Europe. So, also, the Prohibition movement is not seen in its true bearings as a result of the continuing activity of precisely the same spirit which brought about the sixteenth century moral change—that is, the alliance between a narrow religious fanaticism on the one hand and the avarice of the merchant and “captain of industry” on the other. The adoption of the American Prohibition amendment coincided closely in time with the close of the Great War which has brought industrial strife to a head. To those sufficiently instructed to know Prohibition and industrial strife as alike children of the Protestant spirit, the coincidence is a symbol and a warning.
To recapitulate: the sixteenth century Protestants proclaimed the supremacy of private judgment over corporate religious authority. Slowly but inevitably such doctrine, making religion not a corporate but a personal thing, has weakened the ties between man and man. Notice now, how from the resulting hedge between individuals and classes springs the evil forest of our discontents which darkens the Christian world to-day. In the countries where the great landlords and the mercantile classes, working under cover of the narrow enthusiasm of the fanatics, won their great sixteenth century triumph (that is in England, Holland and the Northern Germanies) that triumph resulted in the confiscation of Church property by the State and its prompt absorption, not by the mass of the people as in France after the Revolution, but by the aforesaid great landholders and merchants themselves. With the increased influence due to this addition to their wealth, they were able gradually to dispossess the yeoman farmers and, in trade and industry, to substitute unrestricted competition in place of the guild system; but the strain which would otherwise havebeen promptly felt in the Protestant societies was relieved, as we have seen, by the great age of expansion. When the new discoveries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about in England the industrial revolution, that revolution took place in a society in which the mass of the people hadalreadyforgotten their old economic freedom.Alreadythey were accustomed to see their economic life dominated by merchants and landlords (over whom they had no check) acknowledging no definite moral authority whatsoever. In the two hundred years since the process had begun, it had come to seem natural that a few should control the means of production, and that these few, the rich, should look upon poor men mainly as instruments for their own further private enrichment. It was because of the destructive sixteenth century moral change and in no way because of any quality inherent in the new machines that the discovery of these last has made so enormously for unhappiness and strife. It is true that the machines have enormously accelerated the long process which has already reduced the wage-earner from the Christian liberty his ancestors enjoyed to something very like serfdom. But the essential point to be grasped is that the machines haveonlyaccelerated the process, they did not bring it about and they have not changed its nature.
In all this, the Prohibition movement has been an integral part. Prohibition has its roots in the great sixteenth century victories of fanaticism plus greed. It appeared above ground because of conditions brought about by discoveries in physical science acting upon a society coloured by the Protestant victories, although in themselves these discoveries have no inherent connection with morals. It has won a great victory in America and is attempting to invade England at the present day, when the strain of chronic industrial war has become acute and world-wide.
The historical connection between Protestantism and Prohibition has been but little studied. Nevertheless its outlines are abundantly clear. Prohibition was not among the original Protestant taboos. Even the Puritans and, as far as is known, the Anabaptists (who together made up the “extreme left” among the sixteenth century sects) were not prepared to abandon Christian traditionso completely as to hold fermented drinks to be sinful. But Protestantism par excellence, that is Puritanism (from its original belief that worship was only possible through the mind and never through the senses), began by divorcing religion from beauty, and went on to a hatred of the decorative side of life and especially of the simple pleasures of the populace.
The Protestant societies created modern industrialism with its masses of degraded proletarians. As discoveries in physical science intensified the evils of industrialism in general (although they did not create those evils), so in the particular case of drink the commercial distillation of “hard” liquor still further magnified the evil of intemperance. The sequence is clear in both the general and the particular case. Even in the sixteenth century, Protestantism had already produced proletarians and public drunkenness on so large a scale that the first laws against drunkenness are found under Edward VI, and under Elizabeth the first Poor Law establishing workhouses. Until Edward and Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had abolished the monasteries, which supplemented the guilds in what we should call “social work,” it had not been found necessary to build workhouses for the poor nor to jail poor men who got drunk. Certainly it is clear that want, and drunkenness as the habitual result of want, were on the increase. And yet hard liquor was not plentiful in England until the very end of the seventeenth century. A few whisky distilleries had been set up in England in Henry VIII’s time but beer had continued to be the daily drink of Englishmen, and wine that of English gentlemen.
It was not until 1689, when the Government abolished all restrictions upon gin-distilling, that hard liquor became plentiful in England, and then it became plentiful with a vengeance; the proletarianizing process had been going on for over a hundred years. To complete the sequence of Protestantism, proletarianism and hard liquor, came the doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of drink. This seems to have been first preached by the eighteenth century Methodists, who appear as a distinct schism from the Church of England in 1740. Thirty years later their teaching was familiar enough to be noticed in the theatre. In a drinking song in the firstact of Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer,” first played in 1773, we find the following lines:—
“When methodist preachers come down,A-preaching that drinking is sinful,I’ll wager the rascals a crownThey always preach best with a skinful....”
“When methodist preachers come down,A-preaching that drinking is sinful,I’ll wager the rascals a crownThey always preach best with a skinful....”
“When methodist preachers come down,A-preaching that drinking is sinful,I’ll wager the rascals a crownThey always preach best with a skinful....”
“When methodist preachers come down,
A-preaching that drinking is sinful,
I’ll wager the rascals a crown
They always preach best with a skinful....”
By the middle of the nineteenth century the other sectarian bodies, the Presbyterians, the Independents or Congregationalists, and the Baptists, had followed the Methodists in adopting the Mohammedan fanaticism of total abstinence.
The final step of all, that of attempting to compel everyone to be teetotal by means of Prohibition laws, was taken not in England where total abstinence was first preached in the name of religion, but in America. In England the sectarian “Nonconformist” has always been in the minority and after the brief seventeenth century Puritan supremacy the nation turned fiercely against them. In America, on the other hand, they were in a majority from the first. Virginia was settled by Anglicans and Maryland by Roman Catholics, but the other English colonies were Puritan almost to a man. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was an absolute Congregationalist theocracy from its foundation in 1629 for over half a century.
In England, during the short Puritan ascendancy there (1649-60), the sectaries had used the full power of the State to suppress popular festivals and the decorative side of life. It was forbidden to keep Christmas or Easter. At the other end of the scale, it was forbidden to bait bears, “not because the sport gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” as Macaulay has it in a famous phrase. In one of their culminating atrocities, the closing of the theatres, the Puritans displayed their characteristic hypocrisy. Instead of frankly avowing that theatrical performances offended their peculiar religion they gave as reasons for closing them theplague and the Civil War. But when plague and the Civil War had ceased, did they permit the theatres to reopen? By no means. Dancing and card playing they held to be cardinal sins. Their garments must be sad-coloured, although in this respect but little worse than men’s clothes to-day. Their “meeting houses,” whichthey substituted for churches, were purposely made as bare as barns.
But there was one outrage which they did not attempt. They made no attempt to forbid the fermented drinks which immemorial tradition and the example of Our Lord himself permitted to Christian men. It is true that they refused to drink healths, for the practice added ceremony to feasting and they held it to be a cause of intemperance. Beyond this they did not go. Incidentally it should be noted that when the Puritans ruled England none but fermented drinks were known. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were curiosities until after the Restoration. At all events, fermented drinks were the one form of social pleasure permitted to Englishmen under Puritan rule.
In New England, Calvinism ran riot. In Europe it had been the creed of a minority living in the midst of nations firm in the traditions of Christendom. Therefore, while it had been bad enough in Europe, it had never felt itself omnipotent. In New England, on the contrary, Calvinism had isolated communities founded especially for its glorification, and the result was horrible. “Its records read like those of a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart’s tail for kissing each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witch-burning....”[41]The picture could be supplemented ad infinitum by a study of the town records of the New England Puritans. For the elaboration of it, one of their own descendants, Brooks Adams, has written a book, the “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” in which they hanged, gibbeted and damned for ever, and to that book I refer my readers who may be curious in the matter. They were appalling people.
For the purposes of this study, the essential thing to remember is that the eighteenth century slackening of Puritan fervour in America was not death but sleep. Or,to use another metaphor, when its stream appeared to be drying up, it was still running strongly underground. Such a man as John Brown, with his savage and almost crazy fanaticism, would have been perfectly at home in Cromwell’s army, or with Praise-God-Barebones and his ilk.
After the Civil War, American industrialism began to expand enormously. The “captain of industry,” the second partner to the sixteenth century alliance against tradition, was growing into a giant. Insufficient support in this quarter seems to have been a contributing cause of the failure of the first American Prohibition movement. This flourished for a time about the middle of the nineteenth century. It was the work of pure fanaticism, and for a time it had great success. All the New England States, plus New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, and South Dakota, Passed State prohibition laws. But in a few years these laws began to be repealed. Finally, the Maine Law alone remained on the statute books ... and continued to be so often violated in practice as to be a laughing-stock to the whole country.
Naturally, the fanatics could not have won even their temporary successes without the aid of other sorts of men. From the first America had been a “hard liquor” country. Whisky and rum had been the national drinks, and drunkenness had been common. The saloon keeper, like most traffickers in Protestant countries, was but little restrained by public opinion. “Business was business.” Wine was a luxury for the rich, unknown to the populace, and beer seems to have been almost unknown. The frontier, with its tendency toward crudity of thought and its utter lack of social restraint, has deeply influenced the American mind, predisposing it toward rough-hewn solutions of any troublesome problem, thus reinforcing the dominant Protestantism of the country, with its reliance upon taboo. As yet the influence of Catholicism with its rounded, universal ethic was slight. But notwithstanding all these contributing forces, a short experience of Prohibition was quite enough for the unhappy States which tried it.
Not until after the early years of the twentieth century did the agitation again gather strength. In the interim,new forces had appeared, some favourable, some opposed to the destruction of Christian liberty. On the surface, it appeared to many that liberty had been strengthened. Catholicism was growing, chiefly through immigration from Ireland, Italy and the Slavic countries. Immigrants from Germany began to brew beer, so that even the populace began to see there was a possible rival to hard liquor. California began to make wine. With the disappearance of the frontier, men believed that the crudity of mind bred by frontier conditions would soon be resolved into an appreciation of the necessary complexities of settled civilization. So far, this idea has since been proved mistaken, but, in itself, it was not ridiculous. Far sillier was another contemporary notion, namely, that the increasing ease and frequency of communication would bring about catholicity of mind and a decline of particularism and provincialism in general.
However, these gains for the cause of Christian liberty were by no means decisive. Although the influence of Catholicism had increased, it was by no means dominant. To this day, no Roman Catholic could be nominated for President by either of the two major parties. The Roman Catholic, the most numerous of the three Catholic communions, had not even the power which its members might otherwise have given it, because its Italian and Slavic members counted for little in the politics of the country as a whole. The Latins had an especially small foothold in public life. Beer and wine were still mainly thought of in connection with “foreign elements” in the population. The native-born drank whisky, and used the word “rum” as a generic term to designate both distilled and fermented liquors! Between them, the Protestant sects accounted for an overwhelming majority of the population, and their innate Puritanism in morals was unchanged. Their theologies were less insisted upon; most educated Protestants were abandoning the arduous labour of definition, and the fervour which had formerly gone into Protestant theological discussion was now beginning to be dissipated in vague humanitarianism. In part this Protestant energy (formerly employed upon the theology now fading from the human mind) was ready to be used for the enforcement of taboo.
Chesterton’s analysis of corresponding conditions in the British Isles is pertinent here. He remarks that “... it is a singular fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilization, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilized part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays.... All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil silence in the streets.”
“By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was ‘seen’ going into a bank.... The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one ... it is defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply tested ... if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo....”[42]
By the close of the century a new and increasinglypowerful ally, industrialism, was coming to the help of American Puritanism in its opposition to traditional Christian liberty. After 1865 America began to concentrate her energies on building factories and railroads. For three hundred years there had been no universal religious organization binding all men together in a common morality. In such a society, the appearance of machine industry aggravated the evils of unlimited competition between individuals and classes. These evils, it should be repeated, were the direct result of the sixteenth century moral change, that is the breakdown of universal religious authority and the consequent weakening of moral solidarity between men. Machine industry neither created the evils of unrestricted competition nor essentially changed their character. But it did aggravate them enormously because it increased the size of the industrial unit and thereby reduced to a vanishing point the personal contact between owners and wage earners. Owner and industrial wage earner tended to look upon one another less and less as fellow beings, engaged for mutual benefit in common tasks, more and more as abstract commodities—if not as definitely hostile forces, “capital” and “labour.” Wage earners organized themselves into unions which were ultimately to develop great powers of economic obstruction, but, so far, no faculty for constructive reform of industry. Owners meanwhile cast about how they might make of “labour” a more effective instrument for their own enrichment.
It is but fair to say that the “captains of industry” were not altogether cold-blooded in the matter. They had conceived a horrible affection for the new and vast forces under their control, and in this they were imitated by their numerous admirers among people whom a European would call middle class. Such people not only permitted the mechanizing of life, they actively encouraged it. Consequently, as Henry Adams put it: “The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions, or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs,without breaking his neck.”[43]That the worship of the new mechanical energies was ruining the nerves of wealthy and middle-class Americans and imperilling society as a whole was an idea only just beginning to dawn. Almost all educated people consented to the inhuman process and called it fine names like “progress” and “efficiency.”
Meanwhile, despite Henry Adams and his “typical American man,” the wage earner who constituted the great majority of the industrial communities did not take kindly to the perpetual speeding-up process. From time to time he took refuge from his monotonous machine tending in heavy drinking of hard liquor after a fashion unknown to the Catholic peasant societies of Europe, and this habit of his annoyed the captains of industry and infuriated the Puritans.
The solution adopted would have amazed our ancestors. We can only hope that, if record is preserved, it will scandalize our descendants. Instead of striving to restore a state of things in which normal men might be left in peace to get their living and enjoy the social pleasures natural to man, it seemed simpler and more desirable to the leaders of our time to attempt to destroy the social pleasure. As in the sixteenth century, the “business community,” to whom the chief end of man was to make money, joined hands with the fanatic to whom amusement was sinful.
Two other lesser factors came in, as if accidentally, and helped the Prohibition cause.
The first of these accidents was a shift of political power in the South. Until about 1890 the “quality,” i.e., people who had a tradition of wealth and social ascendancy, dominated Southern politics. “Politics” were “qualities,” so the saying went. Then came a change; the small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers gained control. The quality in the South are usually “Episcopalian,” and anything but Puritanical. The “plain people” are nearly all “hardshell” Baptists or “shoutin’” Methodists. Neither of these sects are Calvinists like the original Puritans, but both are aggressively Puritan in theirdiscipline. The Baptists are the indirect successors of the Anabaptists, the “extreme left” in the sixteenth century religious struggle. The Methodists began as a schism from the Church of England and, as we have seen, were the first Christians to preach total abstinence instead of temperance in drink. As a substitute for drink, and for the other forms of social pleasure condemned by their discipline, they find an outlet in their orgiastic worship. Hence the epithet “shoutin’.” Of all Christian sects, these two are among those furthest from tradition. The proportion of college-bred or otherwise cultivated men and women in either denomination is small. Even their ministers are usually uneducated. On the other hand, these preachers are industrious, zealous, and devoted, so that they wield great influence. Naturally, with such ministers, the mental effort required for ethical definition is not to be found and taboo luxuriates. “Drink” to these people means whisky in rowdy dives. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Southern States under their new masters began to go Prohibition.
Southerners, anxious to avoid the reproach of intolerance, will sometimes say that the desire to keep liquor from the negroes was the chief motive for Prohibition. Liquor, they will say, inflamed the negro’s passions and predisposed him to attempt rape upon white women. On the other hand, the presence of negroes had nothing to do with the situation described in the last paragraph, and such an authority as William Garrott Brown, himself a Southerner, has recorded his opinion that the race question had little to do with Southern Prohibition.
The same author tells us that the pseudo-scientific propaganda against drink was scarcely heard of during the Southern Prohibition campaigns. According to him they were conducted, and won, “... mainly by the devices of a methodist revival ...; by terrifying and rather coarse emotional oratory from pulpit and platform, interspersed with singing and praying; by parades of women and children, drilled for the purpose; by a sort of persecution, not stopping short of an actual boycott, of prominent citizens inclined to vote wet; ... and finally, by fairly mobbing the polls with women and children, singing, praying and doing everything conceivableto embarrass and frighten every voter who appeared without a white ribbon in his lapel.”
“It is these methods, gradually perfected in campaign after campaign, that have won for Prohibition so many victories....”[44]
The present writer has been told by eye-witnesses of the use of similar methods in imposing Prohibition upon the North-Western States.
The second accident which played into the hands of the Prohibitionists was a new piece of political mechanism, the direct primary.
The traditional American method of nominating candidates for office was the “convention.” Conventions might be self-appointed, called together by the force of some wave of enthusiasm. Normally they were routine assemblies representative of the established parties in the various political subdivisions of the country, states, counties, cities, &c. Such an assembly would be elected by the party voters, would formulate a “platform,” that is a declaration of party principles and purposes, and would also nominate candidates to stand for election on the platform. If a platform were adopted to which any delegate could not bring himself to support, it was his moral duty to “walk out” of the convention and separate from the party. Consequently it was the aim of the platform makers to set forth such principles as would retain in the party as many as possible of those who usually voted its ticket, and at the same time attract as many votes as possible from “independents” and voters enrolled in other parties. In such a system minorities of “cranks” were at a discount.
The convention system was changed as one of the results of the change in the typical American mood away from boundless self-confidence to exaggerated self-criticism. Part of the new self-criticism was directed against the leadership of the various political parties. With the touching American faith in legal mechanism as a corrective of conditions unrelated either to legal theory or practice, it was proposed to make nominations dependent upon preliminary elections or “directprimaries” in which the enrolled voters of the given party might express themselves independently of the party “bosses” (at least so it was naively hoped by those who fostered the scheme).
The failure of the direct primary to improve political conditions in general does not concern this study. But among its various effects, few of which its advocates had foreseen, it undoubtedly furthered the Prohibition movement by increasing the political importance of any organized group of “cranks,” i.e., people interested in one particular question of public policy to the exclusion of other matters. The Prohibitionists were an admirable example of such a group, but other active minorities, such as the suffragettes, have benefited enormously by the direct primary. In the first place, it proved well nigh impossible to get the average citizen to cast his vote in a direct primary, because in cases of contested nominations for minor offices the aforesaid average citizen knew little and cared less as to the whole matter. The cranks he regarded with an amused and contemptuous tolerance. He could not believe that the new nominating device could give power to such people. Hence the cranks of all sorts gained influence out of proportion to their numbers, and promptly brought that influence to bear upon candidates for office, and especially candidates for the minor offices, such as members of State legislatures. Under the convention system it was very hard to put Prohibition into a party platform, for such a course would have been immediately followed by secession on the part of many who were accustomed to vote the party ticket. But under the direct primary, a candidate for nomination knew that those who were cranks upon a certain matter would support or oppose him according to his attitude upon their pet subject without regard to his general fitness for office as compared with his opponents. Besides its immediate effect, the direct primary had an ultimate effect even more important in favour of Prohibition, inasmuch as it weakened the party as an organ of political thought. The convention had served as a forum for deliberation and protest. Deprived of this forum, the party names tended to become mere labels and the allegiance of the average voter to his party tended to become weaker as the party came to mean lessand less. Accordingly, the voter became more inclined to throw over his party from time to time, and again the cranks gained in relative importance. Even had the direct primary accomplished the dethronement of the “boss” (which it has not), the result would have been dearly bought by reason of the enthronement of the crank.
Yet one more characteristic of the American contributed to the curtailment of liberty. We have already mentioned his naive reliance upon the imaginary power of legal enactment to overthrow long-established custom. This fallacious belief arose somewhat as follows:—
Patriotism (which is almost the religion of us moderns) is born of two parents, first, attachment to people and places dear to us from long association; second, attachment to a certain spirit which is the sum of the thought and action of the nation as a whole.
In America, the comparative shortness of our national history and the nomadic life of so many of our people have combined to give local attachments a slighter hold than in Europe. On the other hand, the national spirit is correspondingly strong. From the beginning, every effort has been made to define, and thereby to intensify it. The nation consciously dates itself from the Declaration of Independence and, after that, from the adoption of the Federal Constitution. So powerful have these formulas been that in America, more than in any other country, it is possible to use almost interchangeably the words “national spirit” and “national doctrine.”
It is true that the chief points of this national doctrine are that men have certain inherent, natural rights ... predominantly the right to “liberty,” that they are equal in those rights, and in all other matters touching the law. Obviously this implies for instance that no citizen or group of citizens should be empowered to compel their fellows either to consume or to refrain from any given sort of food or drink.
On the other hand, the reverence paid to the written law, founded upon the Declaration and the Constitution, has resulted in widespread error as to the nature of law itself. The majestic formulas of the Declaration, and the governmental framework set forth in the Constitution, changed in no way the manners and customs ofAmericans. Their power was derived from the response which they roused in the rooted instinct of men of European stock. The underlying spirit of Christendom breathed life into them. Unhappily the mass of Americans, cut off as they were from tradition—first by their Protestantism and secondly by the Atlantic—instead of recognizing the traditional source from which the strength of their national formula was derived, mistakenly believed that strength to be derived from the fact that these formulas had been made the basis of American statute law. Instead of recognizing in statute law merely the ratification of established custom resulting from the sum of human activities, they erroneously came to believe that human activities could be compelled to conform to statutes merely because these statutes were proclaimed to have the force of law, and irrespective of the fundamental laws of human nature and inexorable human limitations which underlay those activities. “Men do not make the laws. They do but discover them,”[45]says Vice-President Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. And in so saying he indicts one of the great failures of American thought.
Having thus considered the real forces making for Prohibition, it remains for us merely to mention some of the more prevalent bits of claptrap which formed the stock-in-trade of Prohibition advocates. There were such statements as that the “wine” at the marriage in Cana of Galilee was unfermented! When the present writer was serving a term in the New York State Legislature, this was solemnly urged upon him by a Prohibition lobbyist. The imaginary picture of the ancient Jews, and of our Blessed Lord, fiddling about with benzoate of soda or some such stuff needs no comment. There was pseudo-scientific gibberish on the subject of “alcohol”; it was sought to show that it was a poison. The comforting thought was at once suggested that it must be a very slow poison, inasmuch as all our ancestors for countless generations had daily consumed fermented liquors containing appreciable amounts of it. The argument was on all fours with the vegetarian claims as to meat being poison. It was also sought to show that“alcohol” was incompatible with work; the same might have been said of sleep. There was a crop of wild statements having to do with the “working man,” considering him not as a fellow creature of like passions with ourselves but as a strange monster transmogrified by the middle-class imagination. It was alleged that “drink” caused the creature to beat his wife even upon occasions when she deserved nothing of the sort. It was claimed that when the “working man” was deprived of his chief recreation (which was admitted to be “drink”) the result would be increased prosperity and good temper in his family circle. The slightest acquaintance with Mohammedan countries would have been sufficient to disprove such stuff. These “working man” fantasies are eloquent testimony to the barrier built up between the classes of the community by centuries of Protestantism. Together with the rest of the Prohibition claptrap, they deserve to be recorded in triple brass in order to be the laughter, or the pity, of generations to come.
Our generation has made a fine art of anonymity and the use of “dummies” in finance. Therefore it is impossible at this time, and will probably remain impossible, to expose the true sources from which the twentieth century puritans got their propaganda fund. It is common knowledge that many, if not most, of the large employers of “labour” sympathized with the Puritan cause ... as in the sixteenth century. It is believed that the Rockefellers gave enormously, and the fact that they are the most prominent Baptist laymen in the country, if not in the world, makes the belief seem probable.
The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has not ended the Prohibition movement in America. So far, the task of enforcement has proved impossible. Probably there has been some appreciable reduction in the amount of fermented and distilled liquors consumed. Certainly the price of liquor has increased and its quality has deteriorated. No man can foretell the future: prophets are the jesters of posterity. Given the extreme difficulty of repealing a constitutional amendment (repeal would require a majority of two-thirds in the United States Senate, and again in the Federal House of Representatives, and after that a favourable vote in both branches of the legislature in three-fourths of the States)it seems probable that the Eighteenth Amendment will remain upon the statute books at least for a considerable time. However, there is already one amendment, the fifteenth, intended to secure the franchise to the negroes of the South, which slumbers on the statute books. At present, the Prohibition Amendment is a farce throughout many populous States, and the burdened taxpayer is loaded with the salaries of enforcement officials. The position of these enforcement officials somewhat resembles that of the Viking pirates of the ninth century. They have an enormous territory which they can raid almost at will, and throughout which they can annoy the inhabitants. But they are so few that, even with the enormous powers of movement and communication at the disposal of a modern Government, they are unable to constrain the activities of the millions among whom they operate. Like the old pirates again, these officials can frequently be bribed into harmlessness. Meanwhile, it is still possible to believe, if anyone desires to do so, that the immemorial traditions of Christendom will yield to a written law backed up by a handful of officials.
The spectacle is of absorbing interest to the student of history, who personifies the memory of the race. In his more sanguine moods he sees the gently sloping vineyards by Loire, he hears Rabelais roaring with laughter from his deep lungs, and he looks forward to a happy confounding of fools. Again he feels an antique paganism settle down upon him like a grey mist, and he remembers the vengeance of the Gods as Euripides has told it in the “Hippolytus” and, above all, in the “Bacchæ.” For the student of history knows that the forces of our human nature, which the ancients personified as Gods, are immortal. Man may persecute but cannot kill them, and under his persecution they become demons who turn and rend him, as Savonarola and the old English Puritans found. Even St. Francis’ death-bed was darkened a little by his memory of his own austerities. “I have sinned,” he said, “against my brother the ass.” And what were the voluntary sufferings of a monk or of all monks put together, as sins against “the Gods” of life, compared with the deliberate, forcible, attempt to teetotalize a whole nation?
As an assault upon human liberty, what was even theInquisition compared to the American Anti-saloon League?
In closing, let us recapitulate the points of resemblance and of divergence between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. Both were religious in their essence; the Protestant denomination made the second, just as certainly as the thirteenth century Catholic Church made the first. Both movements, being religious, were based upon beliefs transcending the human reason. In the case of the Inquisition the belief in question was the Catholic Faith; in the case of Prohibition it is belief in the innate sinfulness of distilled and fermented drinks. Both movements had a secular as well as their dominant religious side. A thirteenth century man careless of The Faith, even an infidel in personal belief, might have cordially approved of severities against heretics, because of the social dispeace which the presence of avowed heretics tended to cause. The infidel emperor Frederic II, with his drastic Inquisitorial legislation, is a case in point. Just so, it is possible for a man to be a sincere Prohibitionist, on account of some idea of the harmfulness of “drink” to the generality of mankind, especially to the “workingman,” although he regards its use by himself as beneficent. Indeed the tiny minority of Prohibitionists who believe themselves to be well educated are usually of this sort. Finally, as the Inquisition appears to be contrary to the spirit of Our Lord’s teaching, so the Prohibition movement is certainly contrary to His practice, at the marriage of Cana, at the Last Supper, and generally throughout his life.
On the other hand, in spite of so much resemblance, there are important differences between the Inquisitor and the Prohibitionist. In the first place, there is a profound difference as to intellectual integrity and candor. Catholic faith and morals were, and are, definite. From the time when the Church emerges into the full light of abundant historical record, in the first years of the third century, she has regarded their definition as one of her chief functions. Her corporate tradition declares that such was the case from her beginning, and the documents which survive from the first two centuries cannot, to say the very least, be made to contradict this conclusion. Protestantism, on theother hand, was from the first a revolt against authoritative corporate definition. From the sixteenth century to the present time its theological and ethical vagueness has increased until a climax, it would seem, has been reached in the matter of Prohibition.
No clear statement of the Prohibitionist credo has ever been made and endorsed by even a majority of those engaged in the movement. An attempt has been made to say that “temperance” involves moderation in the use of that which is good and total abstinence from that which is harmful. But this attempt fails in two respects, inasmuch as it confuses temperance with the purely secular virtue of prudence which is nothing to a man’s salvation and therefore no possible part of the moral teaching of any Christian body, and inasmuch as it obviously conflicts with the corporate experience of mankind in calling the moderate use of fermented drinks “harmful.”
The contrast here is as great as that between civilization and barbarism itself. Certainly definition, like any other activity, can be carried to excess, as Pope Leo XIII recognized in his Encyclical on Scholasticism, wherein he mentions the “too great subtlety” of certain of the mediæval doctors. But, as certainly, it is the essential intellectual difference between civilized and barbarous man that the barbarian willingly accepts vagueness of mind, whereas the civilized man is continually striving to seize and formulate the laws which govern the universe about him in so far as his reason is in any way capable of comprehending them.
Secondly, there is another vast difference in the urgency of the social and political considerations making for the two movements. As we saw in the first chapter, mediæval man had built up a society in which all men had definite functions, and in which destructive competition between classes and individuals was reduced to a minimum. Despite insufficient checks upon cruelty and brutality, and despite the scantiness of its knowledge of history and of natural science, the time had produced a general level of craftsmanship as unknown since the sixteenth century as it was unequalled before the twelfth (the short best period of Greece only excepted). In promoting the happiness of mankind as a whole, mediæval societyseems never to have been equalled. Certainly the cheerfulness of the memorials which the thirteenth century has left us is unique. And in this society the Church was central and indispensable. To the educated mediæval man (who, while inferior to his modern colleagues in range of information, at the same time surpassed us in clarity and rationality)—to the educated mediæval man, I say, it was evident that to shatter the Church by attacking her Faith and Morals would be to shatter his balanced society altogether, and set men preying wolfishly upon one another. The common man, by a sort of instinct, was equally determined upon the point. And what is more, their fear was justified, as the last three centuries have abundantly proved, although the age of expansion has postponed to our own day the fulness of the evil of strife between man and man. Therefore the men of the Middle Ages were correct in resisting attacks upon the Church as attacks upon all they valued in civil society as well as in religion.
The secular case for Prohibition is not nearly so strong as the secular case for the Inquisition. It might be argued that industrialism is central and fundamental in our society, and that Prohibition, which is said to aim at “greater industrial efficiency,” therefore resembles the Inquisition in being the servant of the fundamental thing in the life of the community in which it has arisen. But even if the truth of this idea, so far as it goes, be conceded, still obstinate facts remain. Industrialism flourished before Prohibition. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether the attempt to abolish one of the chief pleasures of mankind will result to the advantage even of the industrial system. It is at least equally probable if the industrial labourer were to be really deprived of his liquor that his energy would decline because of a slackening in the zest for life characteristic of Christendom. Certainly the history and present condition of the Prohibitionist Mohammedans indicate energy far inferior to that of Christian men, merry with their beer, their cider and their wine. Even if an increasing energy on the part of the industrial labourer under Prohibition be assumed, still there is no assurance that he will concentrate that energy on his work. In such a case, it is at least equally probable thathe will find the dulness and monotony of his life, already devastatingly dull and monotonous, so increased under Prohibition that he will decide to expend a large part of his vigour in industrial strife or in revolutionary movements. For the ordinary modern man does not love industrialism as mediæval man loved the world which he had made. The thirteenth century guildsman would cheerfully fight for his guild and his customs, the modern man sacrifices himself to the life of the factory as heavily as the heathen Semites sacrificed men to Moloch. The Inquisition was a measure of defence. Its fires burnt in behalf of things which the mass of mankind saw and felt to be good. The Prohibition movement is an act of aggression, of questionable value even for its own ugly purpose. The one Prohibition counterpart of the twelfth century spontaneous popular lynchings of heretics was the bar-smashing activities of the virago Carrie Nation.
Last of all, there is, at the very least, a difference in the degree of contradiction to the teaching and example of Our Lord (as recorded in the Canonical Gospels), between the Inquisition and the Prohibition movement. So as to meet possible opposition half way, let us abandon the conclusions of the Rev. A. Vermeersch, S.J., who seems to hold that there was no contradiction between the Inquisition on the one hand and the doctrine and example of Our Lord on the other. The present writer must confess that the learned Jesuit’s forceful work is somewhat weakened by traces of a curious obliquity of mind, as when he defines “religious liberty” as “the liberty of the true religion!” For the sake of the arguments against the Prohibitionists, let us rest our case upon the conclusions of Vacandard, whose book is entrenched behind an array of “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” from Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority equal in impressiveness to that displayed by Vermeersch. Vacandard calls the Inquisitorial forms of procedure “despotic and barbarous,” and flatly says that “severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation ... were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.” Nevertheless, the contradiction between Inquisitorial severity and the “spirit of the Gospel” must to some extent be qualified. The logical conclusion is irresistible that if (as allChristians must) we assume Our Lord’s doctrine and example to be of inestimable value to mankind, we must admit that any attempt to pervert that doctrine and example so as to make Our Blessed Lord say and do as he did not is a more serious matter than any crime recognized by law. Furthermore, this argument from reason is, in a measure, supported by authority in the person of Our Lord himself because of the extreme bitterness with which he denounced the Pharisees for perverting religion.
On the other hand, the contradiction between Prohibition and the Gospels is complete and absolute. According to the Gospels, Our Lord spent most of his time in the society of men and women. Especially he hallowed, by his continual use of it, the adornment of social life by wine, so much so that his enemies called him “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.”[46]We find him working a miracle so that a wedding party, including himself, might be abundantly supplied with wine ... as if any wedding party since the creation would have cared whether or not they were indefinitely supplied with grape-juice. He did even more—he made wine a part of the Sacrament—the one ceremonial act which he prescribed. Bacchus-Dionysus also, so the pagan Greeks taught, had made wine a sacrament of fellowship, human and divine. In contrast with the dull and repulsive fanaticism taught in so-called Christian Protestant churches in the United States to-day, the traditional Christian, like the heathen worshipper of Bacchus, seeks and has ever sought communion with his God in the drinking of wine.