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) 69.

"It is, of course, inevitable that a legislative code resting on so false a basis cannot last. Prohibition will not last forever. Sooner or later there will be a return to common sense and common justice. But the end will not come for a long time yet. Organized tyranny is difficult to break…. Without the war, national prohibition would never have been voted even by the politicians. It has swept through the Legislatures on a false wave of agitation masquerading as patriotism. It owed much to the fact that Germans are by way of drinking beer, and that such names as Anheuser Busch and Schlitz and Papst do not somehow sound altogether British. But as it came, so it will go. The unexpected will happen again. In the course of time some unforeseen contingency will send a new amendment rippling through the American Legislatures. Social life and individual liberty will be freed from the incubus that now lies on them.

Meanwhile, it is well for the British people to be warned. If they do not strangle in its cradle the snake of prohibition, then the country will be given over in its due time to the regime of the fanatic, the informer and the tyrant, such as we have in North America even now."