Any resort whatever to alcoholic drinks being held by so large a proportion of the persons who are most influential in religious and educational circles to be sinful and incompatible with the best character, it is almost inevitable that, in thousands of cases, desires and needs which would find their natural satisfaction in temperate and social drinking are turned into the secret and infinitely more unwholesome channel of drug addiction.  How much of the extraordinary extent of this evil in America may be due to this cause, I shall of course not venture to estimate; but that it is a large part of the explanation, I feel fairly certain.  And my belief that it is so is greatly strengthened by the familiar fact that in the countries in which wine is cheap and abundant, and is freely used by all the people, drunkenness is very rare in comparison with other countries.  As easy and familiar recourse to wine prevents resort to stronger drinks, so it seems highly probable that the practice of temperate drinking would in thousands of cases obviate the craving for drugs.  But when all drinking, temperate and intemperate, is alike put under the ban, the temptation to secret indulgence in drugs gets a foothold; and that temptation once yielded to, the downward path is swiftly trodden.  Finally, there is a broad view of the whole subject of the relation of Prohibition to life, which these last reflections may serve to suggest.  When a given evil in human life presents itself to our consideration, it is a natural and a praiseworthy impulse to seek to effect its removal.  To that impulse is owing the long train of beneficent reforms which form so gratifying a feature of the story of the past century and more.  But that story would have been very different if the reformer had in every instance undertaken to extirpate whatever he found wrong or noxious.  To strike with crusading frenzy at what you have worked yourself up into believing is wholly an accursed thing is a tempting short cut, but is fraught with the possibility of all manner of harm.  In the case of Prohibition, I have endeavored to point out several of the forms of harm which it carries with it.  But in addition to those that can so plainly be pointed out, there is a broader if less definite one.

When we have choked off a particular avenue of satisfaction to a widespread human desire; when, foiled perhaps in one direction, we attack with equal fury the possibility of escape in another and another; who shall assure us that, debarred of satisfaction in old and tried ways, the same desires will not find vent in far more injurious indulgences ?  How different if, instead of crude and wholesale compulsion, resort were had—­as it had been had before the Prohibitionist mania swept us off our feet—­to well-considered measures of regulation and restriction, and to the legitimate influences of persuasion and example!  The process is slower, to be sure, but it had accomplished wonderful improvement in our own time and before; what it gained was solid gain; and it did not invite either the resentment, the lawlessness, or the other evils which despotic prohibition of innocent pleasure carries in its train.