# The Conservative (Lovecraft)/October 1915/Liquor and Its Friends

Liquor and Its Friends.
While a cynical press, disgusted at the political acts of Mr. William J. Bryan, applaud in servile glee each motion of his successor, Robert Lansing, Prime Minister of the United States, and presumably a man desirous of bettering our country, has just restored the disgusting presence of liquor at American state dinners. As though to aggravate the offense, Mrs. Lansing has given out the statement: "Mr. Lansing and I are not extremists in the advocacy of Temperance"! William Jennings Bryan was a bungler in politics and a stranger to dignity; a simple creature who sought to apply impossible theories to the government of a great nation; very obviously the intellectual inferior of Robert Lansing. But he was an honest man, bent on the victory of what he deemed right, and bowing before no vicious custom, however long established in good society. Bryan, with the same will that made our administration ridiculous in its foreign policy, made it glorious in its freedom from vicious intemperance. His abolition of wine from tables of state was the first toward giving the American people a high governmental example of decency. What all decent men had preached for nearly a century, he and he alone established where all might view it in exalted practice. His was the only true logic: the government attempts to keep the people to the law; liquor attempts to stir the people against the law; therefore the purposes of government and liquor ​are forever opposed. No government can afford to demand virtue when all its members conspicuously violate it. But our thoughtless masses and unprincipled newspapers failed to grasp the significance of the act. The superficial satirical phrase "grape-juice diplomacy" is a tremendously forceful epitome of the brainless estimate which confounded Mr. Bryan's sound ideas on Temperance with his unsound ideas on peace and politics. Thus with the spectacular departure of the ex-Secretary from Washington there was also a departure of his virtuous principles, and Robert Lansing "is not an extremist in the advocacy of Temperance". In repeating the assertion that Mr. Bryan is intellectually inferior to Mr. Lansing, the Conservative must therefore add a further comparison, and state with equal emphasis that as a man and a moralist, the "grape-juice diplomist" presents a figure which dwarfs into pettiness his wine-bibbing, time-serving, vice-sanctioning successor. Robert Lansing is a gentleman and a real statesman, but so far as a moral example is concerned, he stands on a level with the distiller, the brewer, and the bartender. If the United States government really desires order and virtue amongst its inhabitants, it will promptly require that the most noxious evil of human life be not publicly sanctioned and flaunted in the very shadow of the Capitol's dome, or within the White House itself. True reformation, contrary to the general idea, begins at the top and works downward as if through gravity.
Not long ago one of Mr. Lansing's fellow-drinkers and possible admirers, E.J. Gray by name and beer salesman by profession, also contributed his mite toward the cause of vice and moral delinquency. At Onset, Massachusetts, during a Temperance speech delivered by ex-Governor Foss, Mr. Gray interrupted the speaker in one of his anti-liquor arguments by rising and bawling: "You're a liar"! After this the red-faced liquor-advocate proudly volunteered the information that "he had drunk whiskey and seltzer for twenty-five years", to which Gov. Foss very justly and aptly retorted: "You look it"!
While the vulgar Gray incident may outwardly seem quite different from the conservative decision of Secretary and Mrs. Robert Lansing to serve wine at all their diplomatic banquets, the same bestial demon lurks equally beneath both. In each is there a conscious disregard for natural law and moral rectitude; a hideous disregard which will eventually wreck civilisation.