Life — December 27, 1923 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there is Life there’s Hop Published by LIFE PUBLISHING Cuartes Dana Ginson, President 598 Madi: ILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, of Kansas, has been in New York. While here his heart burned within him on the subject of Prohibition, and he gave an interview about it to our dry con- temporary, the Evening Post. Leading citizens hereabouts, he said, “talk like crooks and morons when they discuss Prohibition.” He thought that if the leading citizens would set their faces against violation of the Volstead law in the great houses of the town, New York would be cleaned up overnight. Every cocktail, he declared, that leading citizens served before meals, was as dangerous as a dynamite bomb. By which he meant, as he explained, that “it is just as serious an offense against the integrity of our national spirit to serve a cocktail in defiance of law as it is to use a dynamite bomb in defiance of law.” Is not that an interesting example of what a naturally rational man has to think he thinks in order to defend the Volstead law! Of course William knows as well as any one that serving cocktails, even though they have boot- leggers’ gin in them, is a less serious offense than murder, but he has to pre- tend it’s just as bad. It makes one sorry for him. Who talks most like a moron, a man who talks as William does about cocktails, or one who says the Volstead law is a bad law with a lie in it? William says if we are going to have a Constitution it cannot be obeyed in spots. Doubtless that looks to him like a self-evident truth, but the fact is that the Constitution, the Penal Code and the Ten Commandments have never been obeyed except in spots. That is ison Avenue, Net English Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs.. COMPANY Le Roy Mitier, Sec'y and Treas. York Londor, the best you can do with prohibitory laws. It troubled Moses just as it troubles William. William croaks that the get harsher and harsher and some day they will put padlocks on New York hotels and raid a few clubs. But clubs have been raided already and hotels may have been closed; who knows? He speaks of New York as though it were wide open. It is far from being so. He it were the Constitution. Nothing of the sort is true. The Eigh- teenth Amendment is enforced here as far as it is possible with the means provided and without violating other parts of the Constitution. Most of the saloons are closed; those that re- main are subject to the Volstead law. Rum is scarce, bad and dear. Ten times as many people in the city of New York go without drinks they want as in the State of Kansas. law will speaks of & UT, of course, enforcement might be more zealous. It might be done here as the Turks do it. A correspond- ent of the Herald reports from Con- stantinople that in that city the selling or drinking of a holic beverages is punishable by prisonment from threc days to three years, or a fine of from to 500 lires (a lire is worth $1.75) or 100 bastinado across the back. In order to make the punishment most telling to the offending one it has been ar- ranged to throw into prison thos who can afford to pay the fine, to make the poor pay and to lash the penniless. The rules for Constantinople are made in Angora, a small city now the capital of the Turkish federation, which aims to diminish and injure Constentinople as much as possible. Possibly William feels about New York as Angora feels about Constantinople. He would makc and enforce laws for it to make it sec more like Kansas, just as Angora would like to make Constantinople seem mor: like Angora. The effort is on and will be pressed, of course, but it is going t he quite a job to realize such hopes @G of. HERE was another thing William said in that interview, to wit: that if New York did not respect the Eigh teenth Amendment, it need not expect respect to be shown to the Fourteent! Amendment, which safeguards property rights. That is as if he threatened pub lic assault on the wealth of New York in retaliation for its reluctance to fall down and worship Volstead. When you said that, William, you were throwing a worse dynamite bom) than the man who serves a cocktail But when you lead a retaliatory assault on wealth because New York is not dry enough, how will you contrive an es cape for Kansas, where per capita wealth is so very high, and folks are doubtless quite as fond of their prop erty folks elsewhere? Think more, William. The great question about Prohibition is not whether or not sufficient force can he applied to put it over, but whether in its present form it is going to do us good; whether in two or three genera tions the results of such prohibition as is now attempted would be good or bad for the country. If they would be bad then those persons who oppose the Vol stead law now are characters as vir tuous as the citizens who tipped the tea out of the ships in Boston Harbor. You cannot beat a bad law, William, unless you oppose it. New York thinks better of the Amendment than you suppose and is more inclined than you imagine to get out of it whatever benefits it con- tains. But it does not think well of the Volstead act. The D: perpetually try to invoke a spiritual sanction for the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead law The Amendment is much better than the Volstead law, which indeed is not in accord with it, but there is no comicbooks.com