But the "closing" and "regulating"
and "squeezing" of the "liquor traffic", without any outspoken
protest, means letting the whole case go by default. Under these
circumstances an organised and active minority can always win and
impose its will upon the crowd.
When I was in England I amused myself one day by writing an imaginary
picture of what England will be like when the last stage is reached
and London goes the way of New York and Chicago. I cast it in the
form of a letter from an American prohibitionist in which he
describes the final triumph of prohibition in England. With the
permission of the reader I reproduce it here:
THE ADVENT OF PROHIBITION IN ENGLAND
As written in the correspondence of an American visitor
How glad I am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform
of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is
something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so hard
to move.
We tried everything in the great campaign that we made, and
for ever so long it didn't seem to work. We had processions,
just as we did at home in America, with great banners
carried round bearing the inscription: "Do you want to save
the boy?" But these people looked on and said, "Boy? Boy?
What boy?" Our workers were almost disheartened. "Oh, sir,"
said one of them, an ex-barkeeper from Oklahoma, "it does
seem so hard that we have total prohibition in the States
and here they can get all the drink they want.
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