The End of Prohibition America, or part of it, has
gone triumphantly back to beer, but not back to the saloon, and not, by all accounts, to drunkenness. To achieve intoxication, indeed, on 3.2 beer would involve a volume of consumption beyond the normal capacity of an ordinary mortal. Legal beer is no doubt a great deal more wholesome, as well as a good deal more innocuous, than bootlegger's beer. But stories of how the burial of prohibition was celebrated in New York by no means apply to America as a whole. Each individual State has to go wet on its own account, and not half the States have done that yet. Moreover, only beer and light wines are so far legal anywhere. The American who wants spirits must still get his liquor through a bootlegger, and that parasitic industry is likely to suffer little set-back till the Eighteenth Amend- ment is removed from the Constitution altogether. Even then any State may decide to go dry individually, as numbers of States did before the Eighteenth Amend- ment was ever thought of. Lincoln may have been right in declaring that America could not remain half slave and half free. But it will be capable for a long time to come of remaining half wet and half dry.
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