he would be discharged; and within a week after the order, they did actually discharge thirty men.

All this tends to show how prohibition came to pass in Kansas, and how much more her "initial advantages" amount to over mere geography. She was colonized by the unqualified Puritan temper, seven times refined to the acme of truculence in the fires of the Border War. She has kept inviolate her intellectual and spiritual isolation, her inaccessibility to ideas, and hence her dominant social theory is as stoutly Puritan as it ever was, and her general civilization faithfully reflects it.

Now the trouble with Puritan civilization is that it provides for too few needs of the human spirit. The defenders of Puritanism have always been hard put to it to answer the question which is surely the most natural in the world: If Puritan civilization is so good, why did it so soon collapse? Above all, why did it collapse as promptly in New England as in Old England? Cromwell did great things for Britain; the Puritan fathers surely did great things for the Colonies. Why, then, did the English people almost immediately swing back to the false and vicious system of the Stuarts, and why did New England so shortly fall away from Puritan traditions and social theory?

Puritanism wholly satisfied the one great instinct of workmanship, of expansion. One can do business, as the saying is, under Puritanism. It largely satisfies the instinct of morals-with some important qualifications which we need not dwell on here. But the human spirit can not work exclusively along the lines of business and morals; it has other instincts, too, which a civilization that has hope of permanence must meet and satisfy. The instinct of social life, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, of religion-these Puritanism never satisfied, nay, it maltreated and suffocated them. Puritanism is overspread with the curse of hardness, and the penalty that nature puts upon hardness is hideousness, dismalness. Human society swings away from Puritanism because the pressure on its obtunded instincts of intellect, beauty, religion and social life became more than it could bear.

In 1881 an intending immigrant in South Germany wrote a letter to some one in Kansas in which he hit the precise note of criticism.

"None of my friends can imagine themselves living under such stringent laws," he says, "and they think it cannot be good where such laws are considered necessary." Quite so; a civilization that does not meet these elemental demands of the human spirit offers a life that cannot be good, a life that is illiberal and dissatisfying, and no amount of business opportunities and factitious morals can reconcile one to it. We ourselves, generally speaking, have perhaps not yet sufficiently emerged from the influence of Puritanism to be as keenly aware of this as our immediate descendants will be; but the foreigner, especially of the Latin or Slav type, imaginative, sentimental and well-mannered, is aware of it at once.

All this is by no means paving the way for an intimation that Kansas ought to enlarge and deepen her civilization by opening houses. Far from it. I heartily congratulate her on getting rid of the saloon, and I hope it will never come back. I am merely showing what seem to me to be the chief ground for dissatisfaction with the method employed in getting rid of it, and for believing that it cannot be generally adopted. Nor would I be thought to appraise and measure civilization by its distance from Broadway. The cities of Arles and Ancona are about the size of Topeka, quite as far from Broadway, figuratively, as Topeka, and like Topeka, they have no saloons. But the quality of life in Arles and Ancona is very different from the quality of life in Topeka; and one need see but a very little of it to find it so. The civilization of French and Italian cities has its weaknesses, no doubt; it fails somewhat in meeting the instinct of expansion, for example. But it meets the instinct of knowledge and intellect; ideas are current there, and are handled disinterestedly and not with the fierce, dogged, provincial obstinacy that Puritanism employs towards ideas not of its own devising. Moreover, this civilization has the invincible attraction of beauty and amenity, it is amiable; and the civilization of Puritanism is not.

As the shadow of Puritanism declines, we shall get a new light reflected from older civilizations upon many social difficulties that have so far refused to yield to the method of stark, unintelligent repression which is the only one that Puritanism knows how to employ. With regard to the one problem which Kansas has been

so grotesquely misled by her Puritan strain as to consider paramount it is interesting to find that a citizen of Kansas wrote in 1881 as follows:

Had it become known abroad that Kansas had succeeded in establishing a law restricting the manufacture and sale of spirits and confining the sale of wine, beer and cider to respectable resorts . . . we should have had the approval of all good people, the cheerful co-operation of all respectable foreigners, and the example would have been one worthy of imitation.

There is no doubt of this. It is owing to this simple and constructive expedient that the liquor problem, which has proved so refractory in the Puritan civilizations of England and America, has been so handily managed by civilizations of a different type. The above was written at the time when prohibition was being seized on to bolster the shaky fortunes of the Republican party in Kansas, and it fell on the deaf ear of Puritanism. Yet how easily otherwise such a measure might have prevailed then and might prevail now, whether the issue be regarded as local, State or national! A differential tax, graded according to alcoholic content, and a modification of the saloon such as the Public House Trust and (since the war) the British Board of Control are effecting in England-making the saloon a place of decent resort and general refreshment like the Bierhalle or the Continental café: these two logical and lucid measures alone would reach the core of the problem which prohibition merely fumbles, and carry it nine-tenths of the way toward final solution.

I suggested this to Mr. William Allen White, who is probably the best informed and the ablest native critic of Kansas affairs. He replied with sterling frankness that it was the best way if it could be had, but that it could not be had in Kansas. If the liquor trade, he said, had ever offered a suitable compromise proposition in good faith, there would never have been prohibition in Kansas, and if it were not for the defensive alliance between the manufacturers of

* For example, to the eye of sober judgment the problem of the increase of tenant farming is much more serious in Kansas than the problem of alcohol ever was or could be.

But

wine and beer on the one hand and the manufacturers of spirits on the other, there would be no prohibition there now. as things are, prohibition is the less of two evils, and would have his advocacy.

Insight into the real nature of the problem, like this on the part of Mr. White, argues favorably for practicable reform. With the inevitable weakening of the civilization and social theory that maintains it, prohibition must inevitably weaken and be found wanting; and that time is near at hand. Allowing a maximum for the force of a crude and unintelligent Puritanism in the public and an equally crude and unintelligent Bourbonism in the trade, there still must be in both, even now, a force of sound critical opinion that might unite on a policy that other countries have tried and found to be at once simple, constructive, and satisfactory.

PROHIBITION AND CIVILIZATION

By Albert Jay Nock

(In North American Review, September, 1916)

Prohibition as a policy, has had a great deal of public attention, but the kind of civilization connoted by prohibition has had very little. This is unfortunate, because the general civilization of a community is the thing that really recommends it. The important thing to know about Kansas, for instance, is not the statistics of prohibition—as most writers on the subject seem to think-but whether one would really want to live there, whether the peculiar type of civilization that expresses itself through prohibition is really attractive and interesting.

The Reverend Floyd Keeler, for example, writing in the July Atlantic, devotes a whole article to proving that, in Kansas, prohibition does prohibit, within limits. This is not without interest, of course; still, it would seem much more interesting and truly practical to tell us what life is like under a general social theory of negation and repression: for such is what life in Kansas comes to. That, after all, is the determining test. Burke says-and I earnestly commend his words to the advocates of our grand new policy of Americanization, whatever that means. "There ought to be in every country a standard of manners that a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely." No one can fail to remark, in the present war, the immensely superior spirit of the French in defense of a truly lovely civilization. The final test, indeed, of any civilization,—the test by which ultimately it stands or falls, is its power of attracting and permanently interesting the human spirit.

Concerning Kansas, therefore, the question is not whether prohibition prohibits, but whether, under prohibition, the general civilization is such as "a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish." Kansas, as I showed in my former paper, is essentially Puritan: and