Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II AFTER THE PROHIBITION OF ALCOHOL, WHAT NEXT? The injustice which National Prohibition would do to, say, forty millions of individuals, is so obvious that even mentioning it seems superfluous. What is not so obvious, but equally true, is that the passage of so drastic and sumptuary a law, in this supposedly free country, would establish a precedent dangerous to the remaining liberties of the people. After all the hydra-heads of the Demon Alcohol had been struck off, and the red hot iron of Herculean national legislation had been applied to the stumps to prevent their regrowth, what then would the professional reformers do? Slink into innocuous desuetude ? Hardly. They would become aware that mankind was still degenerating, and would seek for some other Universal Cause. Soon they would discover that the vice of smoking had increased, and, shrieking, Eureka, it is tobacco; down with tobacco!—they would uproot the vile weed, and burn it off the face of the earth. All that would be necessary to make the highest- handed proceedings possible, would be a few fanatics, some analyses of the poisonous substances contained in tobacco, "efficiency" tests to prove that the weed was"slowly but surely" killing everyone, graphic descriptions of "inalienable rights" to breathe pure air, passionate dissertations on the "disgusting and filthy" habits of chewing and smoking, and all capped with statistics of the amount of money annually dissipated into noxious fumes;—the one important fact completely lost sight of, being, that money used to procure pleasure and relaxation, without doing any especial harm, is well-expended. The next step of the minds, not clouded by tobacco smoke at least, would be to enlist the sympathy of women, who are, mostly, of course, non-smokers. Ba...