Victory Out Of Ruin Part 2

The ears had got so accustomed to phrases such as the 'sacredness of property,' the 'right of a man to do what he liked with his own,' that the heart forgot the sacredness of the Gospel and the rights of the people in the land of their birth. It is time we stopped mouthing about the cannon-fodder of war, and began to speak about the cannon-fodder of custom.

II

If poor, blundering, pitiful humanity had not been blinded by custom to the folly of war, it would have made an end of war long ago. But all the days of youth humanity has shut into dreary barracks, learning all sorts of foolish things. And the history it learns is just the history of war after war! At fourteen the centuries seem to a boy but a river of blood. He deems it an inevitable weapon in the progress of the world--this ceaseless killing! It is custom alone that prevents humanity from making an end of that horror. And strikes are only war in another form--the bludgeon of force! Kaiserism is not dead. World dominion for me or destruction for you has its counterpart in two shillings for me or ruin for you. The spirit is the same. If custom had not deadened us to the meaning of war and strike, we would shrink back in horror at the very sound of the words. But, instead of that, ere humanity has recovered from the woe of the one, we are plunged into the woes of the other.... It sounds a respectable sort of word! And the right of a man to stop working seems elementary--for we are not slaves. But humanity has learned there is a higher word than rights--and that is duty. We owe service to our brethren. We can pay too high a price for two shillings more a day if they mean starving women and perishing children. Life is more than livelihood; and if the endeavour to better livelihood means the destruction of life, then it is condemned. And that is what it means. Europe is perishing. Vienna is dying. All over the world Rachel is weeping for her children. What Europe needs is coal and raw materials, that it may have wherewith to buy food. And we go on strike. And ships can no longer carry food or cotton; and Europe will starve ... starving is a good discipline and I shouldn't mind ... but, G.o.d! the little children ... the babies....

'Strike,' we shout, finding it easy through long custom. But our striking is only completing the work that Kaiserism began. And the little graves are dug faster and faster; and you can hear the falling of tears like soft rain.... What savages we are, unable through any disciple to learn that the world can only be saved by submitting to law and by ceasing to wield the bludgeon of force.... When one thinks of the poor suffering, quarrelling, dying slaves of custom; when one sees the world in one blinding flash convulsed in the death throes--Oh, G.o.d!

if only there came a gale from Heaven--a sudden, rushing wind. Only that could save a world blinded like this.

III

You may imagine that I am exaggerating the power of this tyrant of whose despotism you are unconscious. But you have only to think and you will at once recognise that my words are but the words of soberness. Use your eyes as if for the first time--and what a world this is that surrounds us! I read the other day a paragraph in the morning paper that made my blood cold. A discharged soldier got his gratuity and spent his day in jollity. He came home at night and, in the presence of his children, trampled his wife to death, and not his wife only, but the unborn child--and in the presence of his children.

That, in the most cultured city in Bible-loving and Christian Scotland.

And every day the tale is much the same. Little children are perishing, mothers are broken-hearted, and the streets are strewn with human wreckage. The casualties of war pale in significance before the casualties of peace! But this does not move us: we are accustomed to it. These crowded, reeking public-houses, thirty to the half-mile, battening on the misery of the poor--we have seen them from our youth and they move us not. How many in our Circuses and Terraces and Places will even trouble themselves to so much as vote for the deliverance of their fellow-citizens? Very few in these particular places, if I mistake not. For they cannot shake themselves loose from the yoke of custom.

IV

And this same tyrant blinds us to the goal to which we are hastening.

The last great proof of the power of custom is that when nations and empires were perishing they never knew they were perishing. Men were so accustomed to the riches and greatness and security of the Roman empire, that even when it was tottering to its fall they never realised that it was doomed. All nations have gone the one road. They have abolished G.o.d or the G.o.ds! They have cast duty to the winds; they have given themselves to Mammon and to pleasure; and they perished--but they never knew that the world that seemed to them so secure was pa.s.sing away. And unless there comes a change--a mighty gale from Heaven--then this world we know must perish. Custom alone blinds us to the fact, plain to the open eye. Scotland cannot feed her people but for a few weeks in the year. For the rest they must be fed by the food brought from overseas by the fruits of our industries. If these industries fail ... we perish. The Clyde will no longer hum with the throbbing engines or great ships come with food.... And every strike, every stoppage of labour, is but a step towards the abyss.... But probably that is what G.o.d means. He makes the wrath of men to praise Him--He will use hunger as the instrument wherewith to scatter the great Scottish race broadcast over the world, to people the mighty plains of Canada and the wastes of Australasia. A great silence will fall over the plain of central Scotland. The most hideous of all the workings of man will be beautified when the lichen grows over the crumbling ruins.

The mavis will sing in the thorn-tree, dewy with fragrance, where Motherwell now stands ... or Anderston. That may be the hidden purpose of our follies and our crimes. This, at least, is sure, that if we cannot shake ourselves loose from the grip of custom--custom will be our destruction.

CHAPTER V

THE LAST DELIVERANCE

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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation of doctors is a mere fragment of a n.o.ble profession--a fragment separate from the American a.s.sociation which corresponds to the British Medical a.s.sociation. 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed the Legislative a.s.semblies at Washington. Having pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tution requires, the 18th Amendment to the Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution 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 gla.s.s 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, pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion which pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sion for righteousness which pa.s.sed 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 dest.i.tution, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses of the community from thraldom to their base appet.i.tes 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.

CHAPTER VI

THE PERIL OF THE CROWD

The history of humanity is in large measure the history of its own illusions. It has always been towards the mirage that men have tramped with bleeding feet, only to strew the desert with bleached bones. One great illusion has been that the golden age would come when the world's autocracies gave place at last to democracy, and the will of the mult.i.tude became law. It has come; democracy now wields the world's sceptre. But alas! the golden age tarries, and the wistful doubt arises whether the greatest peril confronting humanity may not be just that--the sceptre in the hand of the unregenerate crowd.

I