Every great social advance made by men in the past has been made under the pressure of public opinion.  That public opinion was created by a free and an unfettered Press.  The grim fact that we are now faced with is that the day of the free Press is over.  Syndicates of capitalists control the Press of the country, and newspapers whose circulation approaches a couple of millions create the opinion their owners desire.  The duty of the newspaper is to record facts, and communicate to the people the correct data on which public opinion can be based.  If the Press purposely suppresses what is true, lends itself to the colouring of the records so that the false seems to be the true and the true false, then it becomes the greatest public peril.  A generation that is doped with doctored news can scarcely arrive at the truth.  The newspapers are supplied free by the bureaux of the interested with news that serve their purpose.  Thus it comes that the machinery for creating public opinion is largely in the hands of those whose purpose is that public opinion shall not destroy or lessen their profits.  There are noble exceptions; but, taking it as a whole, the syndicated Press of this country is no longer a mirror of the truth.

I

In the United States of America and in Canada there are one hundred and twenty millions who speak our language, whose religion is also ours, who are the most intelligent and hard-headed people on the face of the earth, yet if one were to believe what the Press of this country says, one would be driven to the conclusion that they are poor foolish idealists who have said farewell to their senses.  And that because the Press serves the public with doctored news.  One day we are told how a hundred thousand New Yorkers are to march in procession through the streets demanding the return of their alcoholic drinks.  The columns are full of the preparations for the greatest uprising of the oppressed and parched citizens.  The great day comes and the procession is a fiasco.  But the syndicated Press omit to record that only a miserable handful paraded the streets, the offscourings of the city’s purlieus, amid the derision of the onlookers.  We are later informed under great headlines that the American Medical Association or some such society has called for the annulling of the Prohibition Law.  We feel that the climate is bound to become wet again, for the doctors demand it.  But we soon learn that this particular association of doctors is a mere fragment of a noble profession-a fragment separate from the American Association which corresponds to the British Medical Association.  But the syndicated Press does not record that fact.  The Press that distorts events after that manner can only flourish among a generation that desires not the truth.

II

There is nothing more to be desired than that the people of Great Britain should acquaint themselves with the facts regarding the greatest social advance ever made by humanity in a generation.  Can it be the case that the millions of America committed an act of social folly when they outlawed the liquor traffic and closed the saloons, and that, awakening from their dream, they are to restore the traffic in alcohol and the saloon once more?  That is the impression that a spoon-fed Press seeks to create.  Can it be true?

To answer that question we must ascertain first whether the prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the States was an act of panic legislation, the result of a snap vote, the effect of a passing enthusiasm or a fanaticism that was triumphant for a moment?  If it be of that order, then it may be expected to be cast aside by a wearied and disillusioned people.  But the movement that prohibited alcohol across the Atlantic has the toil and sacrifice and devotion of three generations behind it.  It is not a thing of yesterday.  As far back as 1834 the selling of liquor to Indians was forbidden by law.  Seventy-six years ago (in 1846) the first Prohibition Law was enacted in the State of Maine.  Fifty-seven years ago the Presbyterian General Assembly excluded liquor distillers and liquor sellers from the membership of the Church.  In 1873 the Women’s Temperance Crusade movement was inaugurated-a movement whose ideal was to make the United States safe for women and children by the suppression of the saloon.  In 1893 the Anti-Saloon League was formed-an organisation that brought the various societies into unity and fused them into the strength of steel.  There were long years of work in school and of teaching in the churches ere on the 18th December 1917 the Amendment in favour of Prohibition passed the Legislative Assemblies at Washington.  Having passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, it had to be ratified by a majority of the various States.  The States had seven years in which to ratify; but within one year and two months forty-five States, with a population of over one hundred millions, ratified the Amendment.  Only three out of the forty-eight States failed to ratify.  On the 29th January, it being certified that three-fourths of the States had ratified as the Constitution requires, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting alcohol, became law.  And on that night the leaders of the movement held a service of thanksgiving in Washington, and when the hour struck ushering in the first day of the new era, Mr. W. J. Bryan began his address by reading the words:  ‘They are dead that sought the young child’s life.’  An Amendment to a National Constitution which has the generations behind it is not one to be repealed.  To repeal it requires now a majority of three-fourths of the States!  The one great fact to remember, is that by local option two thousand two hundred and thirty-five counties in the United States had made an end of the liquor traffic in their areas before Prohibition became the national law, and that there were only three hundred and five counties in all the States which had not declared themselves dry before Prohibition became the law.  If anything be certain under the sun it is that Prohibition is the settled and unalterable policy of the United States of America.  During a visit of three months, and after inquiries in several cities, I never met a single person who wanted the saloon again reopened in the States.  Whatever criticism might be made, there was among everybody only one sentiment regarding the saloon-and that was thankfulness that it was closed for ever.

III

There are, however, those who desire the Volstead law defining alcohol amended so that the sale of beer and light wines may be permitted in restaurants with meals.  To us that seems reasonable; but there is no chance of such a policy being adopted.  The reason is that these experiments have already been made in the States and have been found unworkable and unsatisfactory.  The settled policy of the reformers in the States is to seal up the sources of drunkenness.  Every drunkard began as a moderate drinker; and the evil has to be stayed at its source.  Mr. Bryan described the process dramatically:  ’The moderate drinker says every man should stop when he has had enough.  But the difficulty is to know when one has had enough, for enough is a horizon that recedes as one approaches it.  A frail brother was advised by a friend to drink a glass of sarsaparilla when he had had enough.  “That’s right,” was the reply, “but when I have had enough I cannot say sarsaparilla!"’ The prevailing opinion among the Church and social leaders is that the liquor trade as it was conducted in America could not be mended, and that it had to be ended.  And it was ended.  Having been ended, there is no possibility of its being amended!

IV

It is one thing to legislate and another to make that legislation effective.  We know that by experience in this country.  It took long years to make the laws against smuggling operative in this country; and it was only after Queen Victoria’s accession that the laws abolishing slavery in the British Empire, passed in a previous reign, were made operative.  In the States the stage of legislation regarding alcohol is past, and the stage of making the legislation effective has come.  The difficulty of making Prohibition operative is great, but the difficulty is being steadily overcome.  No law that ever was made has been fully successful:  otherwise there would be no theft and no murder in a perfect world.  In one State-Detroit-it is said that five thousand automobiles are stolen every year, but nobody ever suggested that the commandment forbidding theft should be repealed in Detroit.  There are more murders in New York in any one year than in the whole of Ireland in its most distressful year, but nobody suggests that the commandment against murder should be repealed in New York.  That a law is broken is no argument for its repeal.  And notwithstanding all the smuggling there is no doubt but that the Prohibition Law is obeyed by 99 per cent. of the American people.  ’In Nebraska there are several times as many men in the penitentiary for stealing automobiles as there are for violating the liquor laws.’  The persons who are convicted for breaking the law are the aliens newly come to the country-Italians, Poles, Irish, Spaniards.  A native-born American scarcely ever is found among the breakers of the Prohibition Law, and very seldom a Scotsman.  But the newspapers themselves are the proof of this.  If the disregard of Prohibition were the general thing, the newspapers would cease to record it; for according to the Press news is the exceptional.  To walk to business every day is commonplace and receives no record; but to be run down in the traffic and break a limb is news.  That receives its paragraph.  It is the exceptional that receives the big headlines.  And the big headlines about smuggling across the Canadian border and from the Bahama Islands or about wood alcohol are the proof that these things are exceptional.  Otherwise they would not be news.  That ethical passion which passed the 18th Amendment is now being diverted to its enforcement.  The traffic across the Canadian border is being stopped, for Canada is now going dry.  The traffic from the Bahamas under the British flag is being dealt with.  ’We shall move heaven and earth to make Prohibition effective,’ said the orator.  ’You had better move the Bahamas,’ came the reply.  It would be a disaster if the false impression created in this country by the syndicated Press regarding the working of Prohibition in the States were to lead those in authority to imagine that the people of the States will regard with no indignation the British flag being used for the flouting of the laws and of the Constitution of the United States.  It is impossible that that can go on.  Everywhere in the States the organisation for making Prohibition effective is being tightened up.  In social reform the citizens of the States are determined to lead the world.  I for one am convinced that they will not be turned from their chosen path or deflected from their goal by bootleggers or by Jewish syndicates.  Whoever will judge of the condition of the States regarding Prohibition from the newspapers in New York will find themselves misled.  ’In New York,’ says The World,, ’it will be necessary to install three enforcement agents to a family, so that they can stand in three eight-hour shifts, or hire the entire population of the city as special enforcement agents and set every man to watch himself.’  That is the sort of piffle that is supplied gratis to the newspapers in this country.  What is forgotten is the fact that the millions of homes where the fathers and mothers live and toil, who have carried the law, say nothing.  Their voice is not heard in their Press.  And they have not weakened in their resolution that their country shall be a country where children shall grow up untempted and where monopolies shall no longer be free to fill the jails and the poorhouses.  No amount of jibes can alter the fact that there has been no ethical revolution in the history of the world comparable to that passion for righteousness which passed the 18th Amendment and which is now determined to enforce it.  ‘Our parents,’ said a wet orator lately, ’taught us to lay up something for a rainy day:  how much nicer if they had only taught us to lay up something for a dry one.’  The American will make any number of jokes about his climate, but his determination is unalterable that it shall be dry.  There has been no great moral advance made by humanity in these last centuries which has been unable to hold its ground.  Whatever dust may be thrown in their eyes, the people of this country may be certain that there will be no repeal.  When the choice is ‘Repeal’ or ‘Enforce,’ the American chooses unhesitatingly.  ‘Enforce’ becomes his watchword.

V

Though in the Western States full enforcement of the Prohibition Law has not been effected so far, yet the beneficial effects of the closing of the saloons are so many and great, that he who runs may read.  There were four millions idle in the States at the time when I was there, but the nation was going through the greatest industrial crisis in its history with perfect calm, and without suffering the pangs of destitution, because workmen no longer wasted their money in the saloons.  Here in Britain the idle have been pauperised by doles from the public exchequer; in the United States there have been no doles.  The nation can thus come through a crisis of unemployment without half its number becoming a charge on the remainder.  That is possible because the sources of waste are sealed up.  Statistics amply prove that drunkenness is rapidly disappearing.  The Salvation Army ceased its rescue work among the drunkards in New York because there were no more drunkards to be rescued.  In Pittsburg I found the jail well-nigh empty and the poorhouse without sufficient inmates to keep it clean.  It is the same everywhere.  One great employer of labour, whose opinion I asked, said:  ‘Prohibition has given us a good Monday in our factory.’  That was the most terse and effective testimony to Prohibition that I heard.  There is no broken time owing to drunkenness.  Industrial efficiency has been increased 20 per cent.  One man who had an interest in a big hotel told me that the profits from soft drinks (non-alcoholic) were last year double the profit they used to make by the sale of alcohol.  Hotels never had such a time of prosperity as they have had lately.  The reason is that men can bring their wives and children to stay at the hotels with perfect safety.  The proprietor of the biggest hotel in a city where I stayed told me that he was glad to be rid of the bar and that he would never have it back on any account.  A Canadian-Scot who has prospered greatly told me how he became a Prohibitionist.  ‘I am interested in a mine in the north,’ said he, ’and I went to visit it.  I saw the men wasting their substance and their lives in the saloons-lying around drugged, with their pockets empty.  It was shocking.  I used to give $500 to fight Prohibition.  When the wet agent came to my office after that for my subscription, I said:  “Get out!  I’ll give $500 a year in the future to make an end of all saloons!” It is thus the movement spreads.  The moderate drinker is as determined as the Rechabites that the saloon shall never open its door again-and it never will.  One of the oddest testimonies in behalf of the success of the new law was this saying:  ’In Detroit there has been a falling off in the taxi-cab trade.’  The inference is that everybody can walk home now.  ‘We saw,’ says Mr. Harold Spender, ’only a single drunken man in America for three weeks, and then he was a politician going to Washington.’  In a period of three months I saw none.  Though this reform has been in operation for so short a time, it has already effected the greatest miracle in modern history.  It has healed the sick by the hundred thousand and it has raised the dead.

VI

The readers of the commercialised Press when they scan the inspired articles regarding America’s social uprising have only to use their common-sense to realise that they are being served up falsehoods.  They have only to think what a mighty change for the betterment of humanity has been wrought in the great cities where alcohol no longer seeks and lies in wait for the unwary at every street corner.  Instead of liquor seeking him, the drouth must now seek the liquor-and the search is a toilsome one in a dry and parched land.  What a deliverance that must be for the weak-willed when the State no longer, by licensed premises every few yards in the crowded streets, tempts them to take the road to pauperism and destruction.  They have only to think of the lives of rich and poor whom they themselves knew, that have made shipwreck on these rocks and shoals, and think what a deliverance has come to the nation that no longer, with the marshalled host of its liquor sellers, seeks to enslave and destroy its citizens.  They have only to look at the city of their habitation and ask themselves why it is that so many hundred thousand of their fellow-citizens live under conditions that mean unspeakable misery.  Why are families doomed to one-roomed houses? why are children reared under conditions that mean their being damned before they are born?  The answer is-Alcohol!  In proportion to the number of public-houses in any district is the misery of the housing conditions.  You have but to scratch the surface of human misery anywhere in our cities and you find the turgid stream of alcohol.  Let the reader of the subsidised Press ask himself why all the money spent on clearing and cleaning slums has wrought no result?  It is that alcohol creates new slums faster than the old are cleared away.  Let him ask why all the money spent in mission work, in philanthropic work, in rescue work, has not diminished the mass of human misery; and the answer is-Alcohol!  Let him think of the money now wasted by the workers in the reeking public-houses being used to clothe and feed and house the children-and what wonderful cities we would have and what a new race we would become.  And all that has been done in the United States and in Canada.  ‘Our great claim as Prohibitionists,’ said Admiral Sims, ’is that it has shut up the schools of future drunkards, the saloons and the clubs.  We have saved the rising generation.’  No amount of misrepresentations can alter facts.  The Americans are not fools.  They know their own business.  ‘In every community,’ said President Harding recently, ’men and women have had an opportunity to know what Prohibition means.  They know that debts are more promptly paid, that men take home the wages that once were wasted in saloons, that families are better clothed and fed, and more money finds its way into the savings bank.  In another generation I believe that liquor will have disappeared, not merely from our politics, but from our memories.’

VII

Great Britain led the world in the deliverance of humanity from the degradation of slavery; the United States and Canada are leading the world in the still greater deliverance of humanity from the degradation of alcohol.  Out of the West cometh the world’s salvation.  America, that is for ever singing of itself as the ‘sweet land of liberty,’ is now the seat of the greatest experiment in personal coercion that the world has known.  And that is because the American has freed his mind from cant.  He has replaced the conception of liberty as liberty to do as we like by the conception of liberty which is the liberation of large masses of the community from thraldom to their base appetites and from the oppression of grafters and profiteers.  The main cause of that deliverance was the awakened conscience of the people.  When the power to veto licences was placed in the hands of the people, the citizens became conscious of the fact that when they voted for a licence they were just as much partners in the saloon as if they furnished the liquor and sold it standing behind the bar.  When they considered that the poisoning of the poor by alcohol was a road to wealth, when they traced the misery and ruin that afflicted the community to the saloons, they felt that they could not any longer be sharers in the traffic nor incur responsibility for it.  It was the Churches of the land that wakened the conscience of the people.  It was better that any community perish rather than that they should offend one of the little ones for which Christ died....  What we need is that the conscience of the community should be wakened in the same manner.  The Church of Christ alone can sound the trumpet that wakens from the slumber of torpor.  But the Church seems more concerned about dealing out soothing syrup to its soporific members than about wakening the dead.  The spectacle of bishops denouncing Prohibition in the name of Freedom; of representative Church Councils refusing to recommend the cause of No-Licence; of congregations being narcotised to the slaughter of the innocents that goes on ceaselessly all around them-the victims of Bacchus laid for ever on his altar-while the preacher proclaims peace, peace, where there is no peace, and expounds an evangel of sweetness and light while the people are perishing-all that may well make angels weep.  But the Churches are wakening.  The founder of Christianity prayed, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ and Christians cannot for ever acquiesce in the State tempting its own children to their destruction.  Just as we look back and marvel how any Christian could ever defend slavery, so fifty years hence, when the liquor traffic will have become a memory, men will marvel how Christians could ever have defended the Liquor Trade and looked on, silent, while it swept the young and the strong to doom.