The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1891-09-27
the tonic powers of religious and secular

the tonic powers OF a religious and secular
education.
The remedy for the diseased drink habit
is not prohibition, an attempt on part of
a majority 10 not only punish men for
violations of peace and order, but to make
morals for the minority. an effort that
does not help morals and hurts
law. The evil of intemperance is
undeniable, but prohibition as a remedy is
a remedy instinct with stupidity. Poverty
is great evil, but noisome poverty exists
where the drink habit is almost unknown.
How stupid it would be to pass law pro-
hibiting poverty because it is an evil and
dreadful charge on decent society, and
yet it is not more stupid than the attempt
to extirpate intemperance by prohibition
of the sale of alcohol; which in theory says
because John Jones is drunkard no sober
man shall have legal opportunity to drink
at all. AS for mothers boys who
are incorporate they are no more
proper subject of sentimental sympathy
or effort than any other weak brother or
erring sister. If the lack of stern social
public rebuke and loss of business conf
dence has been exhausted upon them in
vain; if they are incapable of spiritual
shame, self-reproach to the point of self
restraint, they are proper subjects of hos
pital treatment; if they are wilful pleasure
seekers then they must endure the
retribution of shame and suffer-
ing that follows intemperance; for
while society can break the letters of
physical slavery, such as the South placed
upon the negro. society cannot rescue a
single one of its members from the spiritual
slavery of vice and sin; every man as
free moral agent must do this for himself;
society cannot save him from himself by
attempting TO make it impossible for him
to sin. If the mothers son is not free
moral agent and responsible for his
actions he is a proper subject
for the doctors; for the restraint and
treatment of the asylum. If he wants to
be sober he will refrain from drinking;
if he declines to deny himself he must ex-
pect retribution which no law can avert
from him: if he is too weak to reform him
self, then he is one of the worlds "lame
ducks" for which she has shelter, but
cannot be expected to shape the whole
economy of society to the demands of its
"lame ducks"
The survival of the fittest; those who
are able and willing to keep step with the
living, not the dying, world, is the law of
civilization; and the world will not stop
its march to pick up its stragglers or drive
its brutal lawless bushwhackers into the
ranks of order and discipline. A mothers
son who cannot be reformed by the
example of self-control we call tenn
perance is about as hopeless and
unaccountable a result of exceptional cir
cumstances and disease as are those intem-
perate illustrations of acquisitiveness
called misers, swindlers and thieves, and
if We do not lecture honest acquisitiveness
for making money, because dishonest
acquisitiveness is social scourge and
curse, why lecture temperance because of
the sins of intemperance? Law, license or
prohibition, will not make men sober, but
high license as police measure is supe-
riNr to prohibition. 1t will not do much,
but it will do something, while prohibi-
ton can do nothing.