Reading: Fanatical Prohibitionists  Reading: Hypocritical Prohibitionists  Reading: Crime and Conscience  Reading: Inevitable End

Stephen Leacock, "The Tyranny of Prohibition," The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock, ed. Alan Bowker (U of Toronto Press, 1973) 68.

"For the fundamental fallacy of prohibition is that it proposes to make a crime of a thing which the conscience of the great mass of individuals refuses to consider as such. It violates here the principle on which, and on which alone, a criminal code can be based. If I steal another man's money, if I rob another man's house, if I take another man's life, I do not need the law to tell me that it is wrong. My own conscience tells me that. But if I take a glass of beer, my own conscience, in spite of all the laws of forty-eight states and nine provinces, refuses to give a single throb."