THE LESSON OF THE OUTBREAK IN SOUTH CAROLINA.
IT is foolish to deny that the outbreak in South Carolina against the liquor law is a most serious one. It will probably be suppressed, because Governor Tillman, a man of little education but great energy and indomitable will, is the idol of the little freeholders, who, in South Carolina, as in most other States of the Union, wield the majority of bayonets ; but it has already produced a dangerous situation. The dwellers in the towns are in insurrection. The police have been hopelessly beaten ; the urban militia have mutinied ; the Governor of the State has been compelled to exercise unconstitutional powers ; and the Government of Washington has been obliged to warn a division of the small national army for active service in a State of the Union,—an order which always brings up the burning question of State rights. The outbreak is serious if it ends to-morrow, and. we wish our friends on both sides would reflect on it more gravely. It is not an incident in the temperance struggle, but in a much more important question, the degree in which mankind. is prepared. to submit to law. The prevalent idea in this country at this moment, is that any measure legally passed by Parliament will be obeyed, that resistance is practically a mere bogey, that even in -Ulster the threat of armed revolt will, the moment the law is passed, be found to be idle wind. That is, we are convinced, in a great measure a delusion. There are a great many measures, some of them good. measures, which can never be put in operation until they are backed by a nearly unanimous and genuine opinion, because if they are they arouse in a minority the hatred. before which laws are powerless. They awaken the primal instincts, which are for battle and not for submission, or as it used to be expressed, they make men mad. Of course, if the force in support of such measures is irresistible, men fly across seas like the Puritans, or yield like the Russian Stundists ; but it often happens that the force which seems irresis- tible is not so in reality. The big battalions are doubtful of their own right. One of these questions is the use of stimulants or sedatives. Europeans desire one, and Asiatics the other, but neither quite approve them, and neither will move a step against any restrictive law till they are face to face with actual inability to fulfil their desires. They think they will get their supplies somehow, and do not wake to rage till they find they cannot. They yield. to opinion, or they hold. their tongues, or they even support the restrictive laws till at last they become operative, and. then the bonds of society suddenly give way. In India, if we prohibited opium, the people would. give way, and many of them even approve, opium being, on the whole, both to Hindoos and Mussulmans, a doubtful indulgence ; till suddenly they got none, and. then would come insurrection, which the native troops, who eat opium, would refuse to quell. That is just what has happened in South Carolina, and will happen in England also, though in a different way. The law in South Carolina has been "engineered." through the legislature, it is stated, that is, it has been voted. for by many repre- sentatives who thought that, like many other such laws, it would. come to nothing. Governor Tillman, how- ever, is a sincere teetotaler, he appointed sincere Com- missioners, they appointed sincere dispensers, and. the unlucky South Carolinian who wanted a drink found him- self in this position,—he could get a very small one at rare intervals if he wrote himself down in official books as a drinker, applied for a dram as he would have applied for a pension, and. was not after all refused. by the hostile dis- penser, who probably did not keep the kind of stimulant the applicant wished for. Sir Wilfrid Lawson says that is not prohibition, and he is quite right ; but to the man who is not a total abstainer it is a good deal worse. He is insulted as well as deprived. of his indulgence, exas- perated beyond all bearing, and naturally, being an armed man with high ideas of the popular prerogative, he "goes for the dispensers" and the police who attempt to protect them. He is hopelessly in the wrong, his duty as citizen being to remain peaceful and thirsty ; but it is quite certain he would not do it if the supply cut off were water, and the craving for liquor is nearly as strong as true thirst. It will be just the same in England. The people appear, to a certain extent, to be with Sir Wilfrid Lawson, because they think that if his Bill passes they shall still be able to veto it in their own villages and towns ; but let a town or village actually prohibit drink, and we shall see in a different way the same result. The minority in the village or town will grow furious, will wreck the houses of the active friends of prohibition, and the police or soldiers will move languidly or not at all. We would not trust the strongest discipline if the Act were applied in its full severity to a place like Chatham or Plymouth, where, until it was applied, no one would dream of riot as even possible. East or West the minority will not be deprived of indulgences it thinks its right, without at least trying whether the force by which it is oppressed is irresistible. The people are not prepared for the new regime, and till they are, they will not bear it in peace.
There are one or two moral questions on which laws might easily be passed with the apparent consent of a majority, which, when enforced, would produce insurrec- tion; but as all statesmen are agreed about them, we avoid unpleasant subjects and pass on to others more easily treated frankly. One of these is female suffrage. We believe it to be quite possible that female suffrage might be supported. by a small party in each electoral dis- trict holding the balance of power ; might be accepted by the candidates without remark from the masses ; might be passed. by Parliament as a fulfilment of pledges ; and might break down on the first day it came into operation, the men simply refusing to allow women to reach the polls and the public force refusing to clear the way by slaughter. That would. certainly happen in any Catholic country, and. though in a Protestant one the men might wait to see the working of the law, it would. cer- tainly happen if on any occasion—say, for example, this very question of drink, on which the sexes no doubt differ in opinion though not in practice—the two sexes stood irreconcilably opposed. Force, the ultimate sanction of law, would be applied against law, just as it has been in South Carolina, and will be in India if we meddle effectually with the power of getting opium pills. It is, however, on questions of property that the European world will get its first lessons. To hear many amiable Socialists talk, one would think they had nothing to do but to get a vote to become the owners of a peaceful world ; but the reality will be different from that. Property has not been seriously attacked yet, possibly in this country never will be, for the people at heart reverence Christianity, but if it is we shall witness a struggle such as we have not seen for two centuries, a struggle in which the minority—if they are a minority—will win by dint of sheer fighting and. organisa- tion, and. of their power by conceding part of their property to change the masses into propertyholders. The defence of the millionaire in France or in America is the freeholding peasant and the freeholding farmer, who when it comes to the point means, whatever the theories afloat and even if he himself believes them, to keep his own. The assailants will, as Americans say, have come down to the "hard pan" of human nature, and will find, as the slave-owners of the South found, that the ultimate arbiter, when human nature is too strongly moved, is not law but the rifle.
But it will be said the majority, being as brave as the minority, must always win. We have not hitherto tried to deny that, our object only being to point out that at certain stages in the process of restrictive laws they will ' be resisted by means which are at once stronger and more natural than votes. Of course, if a whole population is convinced, or if the religious instinct can be called in to help restriction, as happened for a short time with the Blue-laws of Connecticut, our argument becomes at once of little meaning. If 90 per cent. of Englishmen came to regard alcohol as good Mussulmans regard it, total prohibi- tion could be enforced without the slightest difficulty, nay, probably with the consent of the 10 per cent., whose consciences would be overawed, or at least bewildered, by the consensus against them. The Indian Government could enforce total prohibition as against alcohol without the loss of a life, because, although some 15 per cent. of the population like drink, not one per cent. doubt that it is highly immoral to gratify the liking. Governor Tillman, in India, could not put down opium, because the fighting classes like it, and are not convinced it is wrong ; but he could put down alcohol-drinking almost without an effort, and by this very Bill. His " dispensers" would have to be lax with the Sikh soldiery, who have a taste for rum with chilies in it; but they might be as stern as they liked towards all the rest of mankind. But we cannot but smile sometimes at the perpetual assumption of our day, that if things come to the worst, the majority must always win. The history of the world is the history of government by minorities, often very minute. Intelligence either masters or attracts the masses, possesses itself of force, and then remains governing, but secure. And it must always be so, for science is perpetually increasing the power of intelligence, till at this moment there is no city on the Continent of Europe which could stand up for three hours against its garrison. Of course, if the minority, either through doubt, or pity, or religious feeling, will not fully use its powers, the result will be the result Mr. John Burns would consider to be inevitable everywhere ; but that is the condition. To take the most extreme of all instances, suppose the Sovereign of Great Britain to be, or to possess, a Von Moltke, and the devotion of one hundred thousand soldiers, does anybody imagine that he could be deposed, or that insurrection, however general, would sig- nify one straw ? Why, ten thousand men with Winchester rifles could tax London at discretion, or with their batteries on Sydenham Hill and Hampstead Heath, turn it in twelve hours into a ghastly ruin. That, of course, is an impos- sible illustration, because officers and men would refuse to obey ; but it is none the less germane to our point, which is, that there are a good many laws which would excite minorities to resistance ; that these laws rarely have the hearty support of the greater numbers ; and that in all such cases the resistance of minorities is a much more formidable affair than lawgivers just now choose to re- member. Sir Wilfrid Lawson is justly among the most popular of mankind ; awl till his laws work, will remain so ; but some day, when they do work, he may find to his bewilderment that he has to ride from the people who like him, faster than he ever rode to hounds.
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