PROHIBITION AND THE CLERGY.

From the International, Sept. 1911.

ST

INCE the inception of my career as a clergyman I have often found myself in fundamental discord with most American and British clergymen of my own and of other denominations in matters regarding the use and abuse of alcoholic beverages and the legal regulation of their manufacture and sale. My dissent was mostly a tacit one or else limited in utterance to private conversation. I never felt any particular desire to vent my views in public and as a matter of fact did not even take the trouble to formulate them definitely before the forum of my own consciousness until quite recently, when the patently harmful after-effects of the present prohibition-wave compelled me-and no doubt a good many others of the cloth likewise-to do a lot of hard thinking and to circumscribe more clearly my objections to the usual stand taken by the average American or English clergyman concerning the problems to which alcoholism gives rise. Having pondered the matter for the better part of three years, I shall now state publicly my conclusions as briefly as may be.

Let me first call the reader's attention to a fact which the selfsufficient provincialism of English-speaking nations is all too prone to overlook: the attitude of their clergymen toward the drinkproblem is absolutely unique and without a counterpart anywhere within civilization, save perhaps in Norway and Sweden. The main thesis back of that attitude has perhaps never been formulated. In plain language, it may be summed up in this wise:

The devil, as supposedly represented by the saloon, is engaged in competitive strife over the soul of man with the Deity as represented by the Church; in a fair contest, with no legislative interference on behalf of either side, the cause of the Church will presumably lose; therefore the secular arm must be invoked in cessantly, obtrusively, at all times and at all odds, to lend its strength to the Church and to incline the balance of the contest in favor of its cause.

This thesis, with its humiliating confession (by unavoidable inference) of the impotence of spiritual weapons and its somewhat blasphemous premise that Divinity cannot shape its ends without recourse to the police power of the State, is absolutely foreign to the clerical concepts, Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, of continental

Europe. All clergymen of all nations consider it their bounden duty, and very properly so, to exhort and inveigh against the abuse of alcohol. A great many European clergymen, alarmed by the spread of national drinking habits, are actively engaged in propa. ganda to have them ostracized by public opinion, as conducive to the abuse of alcohol. But no Continental group of clergymen of any numerical strength worth the mentioning is striving at present or has ever striven to put the Church into the invidious, illogical and undignified position of most-favored competitor of the saloon. Catholic priests and Protestant pastors, Jewish rabbis and Greek popes are all agreed that their concern in the matter of alcoholic dangers and abuses lies with the drunkard, or else with the drinker, but in no case with the drinking establishment conducted on orderly lines, or the manufacturer supplying it with distilled or fermented liquors. Their moral suasion, assisted by the organized effort of zealous parishioners, very often suffices to keep the liquor consumption of whole communities at a negligible minimum. In case of failure, however, it never enters their mind to turn part of the community, with the help of the secular arm, into a propaganda society of secret vice or to lend to alcohol the sinister prestige of a forbidden fruit. Not only do the vast majority of the European clergy refuse their sanction to attempts at oppressive excise legislation, but they lend additional respectability to well-conducted inns in all parts of Europe by occasional patronage. If you have traveled in Europe, you cannot but know this. If you haven't, any traveler of your acquaintance will tell you that the Austrian Pfarrer, the German Herr Pastor, the French curé, the Italian abbate thinks nothing of taking his modest evening potation, his half-pint of wine or schoppen of beer, in the back-parlor of his favorite inn, and that public opinion everywhere acquiesces in the arrangement. Anywhere between Lisbon and Moscow a clergyman refusing on conscientious grounds to enter a decent inn would be considered an eccentric. And the mention of this notorious and indisputable fact leads us right to the core of what is commonly called the American saloon problem.

THE AMERICAN SALOON.

It is asserted by shallow reasoners, that the American saloon, as contrasted with the European inn, owes its bad reputation to the lack of social club features. It lacks seating accommodations, or if it has any, very few patrons care to sit down in a place noto

riously designed for the rapid guzzling of drinks in a standing posture right next to the bar. The very obvious truth however is, that men do not care to sit down in a place factiously and uncharitably decried as wicked by a considerable section of their fellow-citizens. They gulp down their drinks and get out as quickly as may be, so as to minimize the chance they run of being seen by the holier-than-thou element of the town-a fact which queerly illustrates how a social taboo upon the saloon will instantly turn its potential dangers into real ones. That the American saloon was first stigmatized by silly malice and then, as a consequence of its stigma, became a mere dramshop, is a fact susceptible of proof. There are considerable city quarters in Milwaukee, New York, St. Louis, and other large towns where practically the entire population has lifted the ban of social disrepute from the saloon. As an immediate consequence, it acquired all the features of an open club, closed only against drunkards and disorderly persons-a club where well-behaved citizens, not infrequently in company with their wives and grown-up children, after the worry and work of the day, discuss the newspaper or indulge in neighborly gossip over a glass of beer.

To sum up: the American saloon is first made disreputable by an unfair and dishonest misrepresentation of its potentialities and then put under oppressive regulations on account of its disrepute. The first step in the national conspiracy against the saloon is to make its patrons feel that they would rather abuse it hurriedly and without being seen than use it in an orderly fashion, in the sight and with the foreknowledge of all, and to develop its social possibilities. This first step evolves in many cases a really vicious type of saloon. The next step is; to make the vicious saloon a favored competitor in the struggle for survival by the monstrous iniquity of high-license. If every saloon has to furnish to the treasury three or four dollars every day in the year, before being allowed to take down its shutters in the morning, it is manifest that the trysting place of rapid-transit guzzlers and "human tanks" will in the end put out of business the Liederkranz parlor where people drink a little between songs and the Citizens' Bowling Club, where staid business-men refresh themselves after their game of nine-pins. It is likewise manifest to everyone, save idiots or devotees of sanctimoniously vengeful politics, that under the frightfully extortionate levy of four dollars a day the seller of poor beer, other things being equal, will ultimately triumph over the seller of good beer and the

vender of fusel-oils over the vender of real whisky. Again, it is manifest, that the State, in collecting this enormous toll, is practically putting itself into the position, not only of partner in, but of instigator and abettor of, every wickedness or dishonesty to which the individual saloon-keeper may have to resort in order to maintain himself against these fearful odds. If the Liederkranz or the Sick Benefit Society moves out of the saloon-keeper's back-parlor and the painted harpies of the street move in, what shall we think of a rich and powerful State not ashamed to bring about in many cases such a change for the worse by its inexorable levy of blood-money?

And what shall we think, I ask, of a well-meaning but purblind clergy which exerts its powers and prestige in favor of such glaring iniquities?

EVILS OF PROHIBITION.

After high-license, there is still one last step left in the downward course of folly: prohibition. Under prohibition the open extortion of the State gives way to the secret extortion of the local police. The authorities having decreed away the front-bar, are at the same time decreeing a well-nigh universal appetite into the dark retreat of the "speak-easy" for its satisfaction. And since very few men will stay for any length of time in compromising localities, the quickest and most deadly of all intoxicants outcrowds all others. The hush-money paid to the police is taken out of the quality of the spirits consumed. Espial, delation, and all the devils of defamatory gossip are rampant. All the lawless elements in town are morally supported in their stand against society by the one form of lawbreaking that is endemic and clearly countenanced by bribe-taking officials. Respectable liquor-dealers withdraw in fear of legal consequences and leave the field to desperate charThe patrolman learns to despise his grafting captain; the captain knows things about the district-attorney; the bully of a sporting-house keeper with a strong political backing "keeps tab” on the "blind tigers" for future reference in case of a collision with the police; the whisky-supply houses, mindful of the outlawed status of their patrons, send liquid death on thirty days credit; and the social good standing of almost everyone in town-including possibly some thirsty souls among the zealots for somebody else's enforced abstinence-is merely provisory, pending some compromis

acters.

ing disclosures. If there are any clergymen in the United States so fatuous as to bring about such a state of affairs, thinking thereby to further the ends of salvation, I herewith beg to go publicly on record as not being one of their number.

REV. J. SCHWARTZ,

Temple Beth-El, Norfolk, Va.

Beer in Athlete's Diet.

A German athlete, Karl Meinel, of Munich, recently undertook to prove, as a result of personal experience, the value of a diet into which beer entered liberally, as a means of sustenance, while undertaking athletic contests in which success depended mainly on extraordinary physical endurance. He began on March 12, 1911, with the following diet: Breakfast, a beer soup made from a quarter of a liter of beer, (15 cubic inches) a quarter of a liter of milk, an egg, some sugar and cinnamon and three to four moderately thick slices of black (rye) bread. Midday meal, from half a liter to a liter of beer, with four to six moderately thick slices of rye bread and butter. Evening meal, the same as the noon repast but with sometimes one and a half liters of beer. For the "beer soup" ordinary draught beer was always used, noon and evening, "March brewing" was occasionally taken.

On this diet Meinel won first and second places in several very strenuous cross-county runs, over what he described as "very hilly, rough country in Tyrol," the time for one 6 kilometer run, of this character in which he was first, being 25 minutes, while in a 20 kilometer contest he ran third, finishing in one hour, 17 min. 50 seconds. A list of the various events in which he participated, always well to the front, is given, his wind and endurance being by no means affected adversely by his beer training, while he enjoys a freedom from "stitch" and stomach troubles, etc., he never had while training on anti-alcoholic beverages, and his fresh, vigorous appearance was the subject of frequent comment.