PROHIBITION CANNOT PROHIBIT. 17 



surface ; the best authorities say bring it out ; by di-iving it in, yo\i 

 will kill the patient. The weather cannot be changed by breaking 

 the thermometer, it will go right along just the same. You can no 

 more change a person's morals b\' law than you can teach a child 

 to pray, with a whip. It is only by bringing the counter moral and 

 intellectual influences to bear that vice is eradicated. It must be 

 drawn out by attraction, not suppressd by compulsion ; the sun 

 may melt it, but the wind cannot drive it away. There is a correla- 

 tion of forces in the moral as well as in the physical world. When 

 the devils, in Scripture, were driven out, it is said that they all came 

 asrain, brino-ing with them seven other devils worse than the first. 

 Why ? Because the chambers were em-pty, there being nothing left 

 to take the devils' place. How virtuous, that man must be, who 

 never takes a drink only because he never gets a chance ! 



Our prohibitory friends seem to mistake the nature of evil ; they 

 give to it a theological instead of a philosophical cast. They regard 

 evil as an entity, an emanation from the devil, a thing that can be 

 cast out. Now bodily physicians have given up this idea long ago. 

 They regard disease as an effort of nature to overcome an obstruc- 

 tion ; and their method of cure is to assist nature, in overcoming it, 

 not in obstructing her ! Prohibitionists, therefore, from their diag- 

 nosis, are entirely unfitted, to treat intemperance. The real fact 

 is that every evil begins as a good ; it only becomes an evil when it 

 goes to seed, becomes respectable, or is outgrown. In all evil there 

 is a soul of goodness, in error a soul of truth, and to arbitrarily sup- 

 press the evil, unless it is naturally outgrown, one must also sup- 

 press the good. Evil and good being only relative terms, it follows 

 that all Pharisaism is ill founded ; anv and all effort endeavoring to 

 overcome its ?>u</-adaptatiou, is ecpially saintly. To resort to force 

 to exterminate an evil is a sui-e sign that one's own virtue is at a low 

 ebb. It shows a moral cowardice, a lack of faith in one's cause. 

 It indicates that it is risky busmess to allow the whole of vice to 

 combat with the whole of virtue. The prohibitionists see virtue 

 down and they run up to the great bull dog of the State and say, 

 "Seize him ! Pull the Devil off'." Believing that the heart of the 

 Universe is rotten, they beg Congress to cover it with a paternal 

 plaster ! But we have far more faith in vice, under liberty, than in 

 all their regulation and conformity. Give us a good healthy sinner 

 any time, in preference to a dead saint ; above all, give us a good 

 square look at a natural human beuig. 



Now cf what is the evil of intemperance composed ? Instead 

 of its being the cause of all other evils, as our prohibition friends 

 would lead us to supposi', is it not caused by tiiem, the result of 

 them ? Have they not got the carl before the horse ? Is not in- 



