Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-01-17
THE LEGISLATIVE STAMPEDE
FOR NATIONAL PROHIBITION
Dry Landslide Is Retribuiion for Years of
Defiant Abuses in the Liquor Business

EVERYBODY but the liquor interests
- knew ten years ago that prohibition
! had to come. The corner saloon, syndi-
| Gated and subsidized by men higher up,
| has been in many instances an abomina-
tion and an iniquty 1t has been a
source of poverty. 1t is linked up with
| political prostitution. No one ever can
measure the sorrow that has eddied out
| from it. More than half of the men who
go to jails and the electric chair arc, in
the final analysis, victims Of second-rate
whisky.
In many quarters, among those who,
like hotel owners, have legitimate inter-
csts involved with and largely dependent
upon the license privilege, there has been
feeling that undue vindictiveness en-
tered into the campaign against liquor
and the liquor traffic. That is debat-
able point. And in any event the final
responsibility for all the loss that the
liquor business has caused in the past
and all the material loss that may follow
upon sweeping prohibition lies with the
brewers and distillers, who turned to the
saloons in the headlong effort to wiring
the last cent of profit out of their busi
ness.
1t was the cruelty and sordidness Of
the traffic that gave the "bone dry" ad
vocates their first battlecry. They COM
planned against system that first
created a thirst for whisky and then de-
terminedly capitalized that weakness.
All experience gained in the industrial
life of the country made it plain that
reforms, and very drastic ones, had to
be arranged. And yet if the men inter-
csted in the liquor business had been
less blind. if they had been a shade more
conscientious, they might have avoided
the rigors of a "bone-dry" amendment
such as was ratified in the State Legis-
latures yesterday.
For rigorous the bone dry amend
ment will be. The resentment and an
tagonism thus expressed against the
traffic in ntoXicants were inspired by the
shameless abuses of the whisky business
in the saloons. But the sudden whirl-
wind Of legislation unloosed in the last
few days has no limits. 1t reaches to
the dinner tables in countless orderly
households. The thin wines and the
weakest beers go flying into the limbo
Of illegal things. lnnumerable persons
who were never intoxicated in their lives
will be forced to endure a mild sort Of
hardship by the enforced revision of
their dinner schedules and the elimna-
tion Of the relatively harmless bever-
ages which they preferred to tea and
coffee and which are, in the cases of
many persons. less stimulating than
those commonplace brews.
This change will not be welcomed by
everybody. There is sure to be a great
deal Of clamor in the days Immediately
ahead. Yet, if the blow fell heavily. if
the crash was overwhelming, there must
have been a tremendous force of public
sentiment behind it. The whole liquor
controversy could not well have ended
otherwise. The wrongs and abuses We're
too obvious and those who profited by
them were 100 defiant.
Instead of behaving deccntly in times
when an aroused public consciousness de-
manded reforms and restrictions in the
liquor traffic the brewing and distillng
interests became the corrupters of Legis-
latures and tho most liberal employers
Of lobbyists and propagandsts. It APP
peas now that they We're merely piling
up retrbution against the days to come.
Certainly the denouemcnt was sweeping.
And there can be little doubt that there
will be Il mixture Of ama2cment and
anger among those who must endure the
! consequences without having partici-
pated in any way in the abuses that
made "bouc-dryncss' inevitable.
The fact remains that it was the men
charged with the general direction Of
the brewing and distiling interests who
! did more than any one else to make ma
! tional prohibition certain. And it is to
| these men that the comparatively few
innocent sufferers will have to take their
| complaints.
The great question now must relate ia
. . =.