Without considering yet the physical penalty that must be paid for this evanescent freedom, we may make the obvious remark that it is a morally dangerous freedom.  As the Odyssey has it, “Wine leads to folly, making even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had better have been kept silent.”  Alcohol slackens the higher, more complicated, mental functions-our conscience, our scruples, our reason- and leaves freer from inhibition our lower passions and instincts.  We cannot afford thus to submerge our better natures, and leave the field to our lower selves; it is a dangerous short cut to happiness.  A far safer and more permanently useful procedure for the individual would be so to live by his reason and his conscience that he would not need to stupefy them, to forget his life as he is shaping it from day today.  And the lesson to the community is so to brighten the lives of the poor with normal, wholesome pleasures and recreations, so to lift from them the burdens of poverty and social injustice, that they will not so much need to plunge into the grateful oblivion of the wine-cup.

(5) The most tenacious hold of the alcohol trade lies, however, in two things not yet enumerated.  The one is, that much use of alcohol creates a pathological craving for it; the man who is accustomed to his beer or whiskey is restless and depressed if he cannot get it, and will sacrifice much to still for the nonce that insatiable longing.  The other and even more important fact is, that the sale of liquor is immensely profitable to the manufacturers and sellers.  The fighters for prohibition have to encounter the desperate opposition of those who have become slaves to the drug-many of whom may never get intoxicated, and would resent the term “slaves,” but who have formed the abnormal habit and cannot without discomfort get rid of it.  They have to meet the still fiercer hostility of those who are making money from the sale of liquor and do not intend to let go their opportunity.  What are the evils that result from alcoholic liquors?

The one real value of alcohol, we have said, lies in its temporary mental effects.  It raises the hedonic tone of consciousness; it brings about, when taken in proper amounts, the well-known happy-go-lucky, scruple-free, expansive state of mind.  What now is the price that must be paid for its use?

(1) The physical harmfulness of even light drinking is considerable.

(a) Alcohol, even in slight doses, as in a glass of wine or beer, has poisonous effects upon some of the bodily functions, which are clearly revealed by scientific experiment. [Footnote:  See, for one testimony out of very many in medical literature, an article by Dr. Herbert McIntosh in the Journal of Advanced Therapeutics for April, 1912, p. 167:  “Alcohol and ether are the two great enemies of the electrochemical properties of the salts necessary to organic life.”  He speaks of “paralysis of the vaso-constrictor