The Futility of Policing Morality

A great number of petitions from various parties have been presented to Congress praying for the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors in the District of Columbia and the Territories. While it is our aim to favor from first to last the reform cause of temperance, education and economy, we are pained to see such inconsiderate demonstrations on the part of the self-constituted representatives of temperance reform, which result only in prejudicing the cause they pretend to advance. Because, all excesses are injurious. Such demands damage the cause which they thus burlesque, by bringing it into ridicule, because they are impracticable, and into odium because they are unjust. If the total abstinence party will make out a true bill and demand only bare right and justice, they may obtain it. The end does not justify the means, nor is it lawful to do evil that good may come. To ask that an injustice be done, in the name of philanthropy is stupid. Let them be wise enough to take the world as it is, and brave enough to do consistent justice in the face of others' wrongs, and the problem of social reform will solve itself. It is conceded that the use of the products of spirituous distillation and fermentation is at least in some degree a necessity. To prohibit the manufacture in the Territories would be to prescribe that they shall pay tribute in this regard to the older States—a measure as iniquitous in principle as any of the arbitrary acts of tyranny and injustice on the part of Great Britain toward the American Colonies that caused the separation in 1776. James Otis, in 1771, just before the alarms burst of the Revolution, spoke to the stiff-backed, straight-laced Tories of that time of the futility of trying to stop the torrent of Niagara with a dam of bull rushes. It is just as useless to try to oppose the irresistible with paper petitions or paper mandates of negation.