I am an inflexible, uncompromising prohibitionist. If there is anything left to us worth contending for, in matters of legislation, or as a principle of society, or with reference to the common weal, surely it must be the right not merely to restrain but to suppress that traffic which produces more pauperism, more crime, more lunacy, more misery in every conceivable shape than all other predisposing causes put together. Where such suppression is not generally practicable, there must be a comparatively low standard of public virtue, a great lack of moral stamina, deplorable ignorance of physiological law, and criminal disregard of the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship. . . . The licensed sale of intoxicating liquors, no matter how guardedly, for drinking purposes, not only injures and imperils the individual consumer, but brings woe into the family circle, riot and murder into the community, and makes the State accessory to three-fourths of all the pauperism and crime within its borders. No such sale can be granted without moral culpability. It cannot be too often reiterated that there are some
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Massachusetts succeeded in electing a Legislature pledged to its repeal, and the announcement of this unpleasant and unexpected event greeted Mr. Garrison on his arrival from England, the same week; but neither this, nor the reverses of the Republican party in other States, though of grave moment on the eve of the first Presidential election after the war, disturbed his buoyant and hopeful mind.
In the lecture on his summer's experiences in Europe which he gave a few weeks later at Music Hall,1 and repeated in other places, he predicted a speedy reaction in favor of the law in Massachusetts, and of the Republican party in the country at large; and at a great temperance rally held in Boston the following May, he2 was one of the principal speakers.
The Legislature elected in the fall of 1868 reenacted the law, and, in the annuallyrenewed conflict of the next three or four years, he frequently wrote and spoke in behalf of prohibition—in the Independent and at various temperance meetings.
“Whether as a question of public safety or general prosperity, of enlightened patriotism or disinterested philanthropy, of personal freedom or popular government,” Independent Mar. 3, 1870. he wrote in 1870,
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