THE PROHIBITION OF NON-INTOXICANTS.

Although most newspaper editors seem bent on total avoidance of the subject, the many questions relating to National Prohibition can never be settled satisfactorily until they have been dragged into the light of free and frank public discussion. Should the 18th amendment be repealed, or itself amended? If it must stand, is it to be interpreted literally, so as to abolish all use of alcohol, or liberally so as to limit prohibition to actual intoxicants? These are questions which public opinion alone can answer, and the bombshell of national prohibition has left a very much dazed state of public opinion in its wake. As yet the actual enforcement of the 18th amendment is felt by many easy-going people to be inconceivable,--next to impossible. It cannot work, they cheerfully imagine, because it has never been known to work before.

Of course abolition of national prohibition by repeal of the amendment is out of the question. Even its enforcement has already been tried and disapproved of by the people generally, such a repeal would create a dangerous rift in the popular respect for organic law. The Constitution of the United States, our national rock of strength, would sink in popular esteem to the comparatively fallible level of certain state constitutions and ordinary statutory laws. Besides this it would cost endless time and discussion on the part of Congress, State Legislatures, and responsible individuals, at a time when all energies should be bent toward reconstruction, and a resumption of the ways of peace.

If, then, the amendment must stand, questions at once arise as to its application. Assuredly the prohibition of the production, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors such as whiskey, gin, and rum, is a measure of which the good results far transcend any arguments as to the infringement of liberty, and the freezing of the constitution into a tissue of specific dogmas and "shall nots." Certainly the moral good to be done and the physical advantages to be gained by the measure are more than the mere retaining of the fluid and general character of a political instrument, even such as our Constitution.

Spirituous liquors, then, must go, for in the only and imperfect way at our disposal, the people have declared against them. But are light wines, beer, and ale, "intoxicating"? Almost anyone would answer in the negative. Certainly it would take gallons of 3 per cent, beer to have the slightest deleterious effect. As for light wines, even were they intoxicating, their high price would continue seriously to limit their use, and to do away with their abuse altogether. We feel confident that if the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted the 18th Amendment as applying only to spirituous liquors, which alone are intoxicating, and not to light wines and beer, they would be carrying out the will of a majority of the people, and a larger majority of the University.