The prohibition movement belongs, in the main, to a wholly different order of things.  The fight against the evils of drink, as it has been carried on for a century or more, has been animated by a moral fervor which classes it rather with the fight against slavery, or with the great revivals of religion, than with those movements which owe their origin to a calculating and cold-blooded perfectionism.  Its leaders have been fired with the ardor of a war directed against a devastating monster, to whose ravages was to be ascribed a large part of the misery and wickedness that afflict mankind.  It is true that the economic and physiological aspects of the drink question were not ignored; the total-abstinence men were glad enough to have this second string to their bow.  But the real fight was not against alcohol as one of many things concerning which the habits of men are more or less unwise; it was a fight against the Demon Rum, the ally of all the powers of darkness.  The plea of the moderate drinker was rejected with scorn, not because there was any objection to moderate drinking in itself, but because total abstinence was the only true preventive of drunkenness, and drunkenness must be stamped out if mankind was to be saved.  The moderate drinker was censured not because he was wasting his money, or failing to “conserve his efficiency,” but because for the sake of a trivial self-indulgence he was giving countenance to a practice which was consigning millions of his fellow men to wretchedness in this world and to everlasting damnation in the next.

Now this remarkable thing about the present extraordinary manifestation of growth and strength in the prohibition movement is that it is not in the least due to a strengthening of this sentiment.  On the contrary, it is safe to say that feeling about drunkenness, about the drink evil in the sense in which it was understood a generation ago, is far less intense than it was then.  The prohibition movement in its present stage is not the old prohibition movement advancing to triumph through the onward march of its proselyting zeal; of true prohibitionist zealots the number is probably less, in proportion to the population, than it was forty years ago.  Its great accession of strength has come from the growth of that order of ideas which is common to all the “efficiency” movements of the time.  And that growth helps it in two ways.  On the one hand, to the little army of crusaders against the Demon Rum there has come the accession of a host of men who are not thinking about demons at all, but who calmly hold that the world would be better off without drinking, and that this is an all-sufficient reason for prohibiting it.  And on the other hand, millions of persons who, in former days would have cried out against this way of improving the world—­against the impairment of personal liberty and the sacrifice of social enjoyment and social variety—­have no longer the courage of their convictions.  The temper of the time is