IS PROHIBITION A FAILURE ?
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR,] SIR, I can't help writing just a note on a letter weitten to you from the Carlton Club stigmatizing Prohibition as an interference with personal liberty. One would have thought that the existence of the celebrated London policeman would have suggested that the civilized world had endorsed that principle some time ago. In my youth, on a dull afternoon, some of us fired a blank pistol cartridge out of a window in Harley Street, only for our amusment. We were amazed at the amount of interference there was with our personal liberty ! Yet it could not have possibly hurt anyone.
It is too soon yet to analyse the influence of Prohibition over here, but the tendency is all towards a better enforcement and not towards liberalizing the law. That at least means that America is far from persuaded that it is not a success, and she ought to know brat. There is very little doubt but that Prohibi- tion has come to stay. No laws of any kind are ever going to produce that Kingdom of God on Earth which can only be produced when men love the other man better than themselVes. ‘Vhen the public look upon the Carlton Club as an institution exhibiting that spirit, the Carlton Club will have a more lasting influence in making a better England.—I am, Sir, &c.
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