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B-b-but - I would have won, Graham!
I am sick, but I'm still a winner! God damn it!
― Sarah McLusky (coco), Monday, 20 January 2003 16:19 (twenty-one years ago) link
three weeks pass...
but really, I'm gonna retire from this thread
― jel -- (jel), Monday, 10 February 2003 19:47 (twenty-one years ago) link
Senator BRUCE. Begot by, the abuses of the old saloon, and hastened to maturity by the economic necessities and uncalculating enthusiasm of the World War, and by the lavish use of money and political threats by the Anti-Saloon League, national prohibition went into
legal effect upward of six years ago, but it can be truly said that, except to a highly qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all. The appetite for drink, which has been one of the primal impulses of the great mass of human beings ever since Jesus at Cana manifested forth His glory, to use the words of St. John, by converting the water in six water pots into wine, has, In its struggle with the vast repressive agencies set in motion by the eighteenth amendment and the Volstead Act, furnished another illustration of the truth, which neither moralist nor statesman should ever forget, even in his most fervid moments of disinterested or generous feeling, that man is a creature who can be regulated and bettered, but can not be made over. Once, during the agitation for the abolition of human slavery, Henry Brougham decried what he termed "the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man." As wild and guilty is the fantasy that even the power of the Federal Government can totally divest man of his warm garment of animal sensations, desires, and appetites. Ever since the eighteenth amendment and the Volstead Act became parts of the legislation of our land the human instinct of personal liberty, guided by a correct sense of the limits within which natural law can be controlled by municipal ordinances, has maintained an unbroken resistance to them; and nothing can be more unwarranted than the statement often heard that this resistance is limited to a single self-indulgent social class.
It is not kept up more stoutly by what the prohibitionists, vainly seek to excite social disaffection and jealousy, call the smart social set, than it is by the members of the American Federation of Labor. It is not limited to any social class or sect. It has brought about close working relations between the bootlegger and thousands of the most intelligent and virtuous members of American society who feel no more compunction about violating the Volstead Act than the Free Soiler did about violating the fugitive slave law, or the southern white did about nullifying ignorant negro, suffrage, the Federal Constitution in each instance to the contrary notwithstanding And the ever mounting record of arrests for drunkenness in all of our American cities since the enactment of the Volstead Act indicates only too significantly that the humbler and less fortunate members of society have their illicit purveyors of drink too. The recent utterances of Jewish rabbis, Protestant bishops and ministers, and of Catholic prelates like Cardinals O'Connell and Hayes, demonstrate the existence of a growing feeling, even among the American clergy, that absolute prohibition is not the ally but the enemy of human morality.
― Rockist Scientist, Monday, 10 February 2003 19:50 (twenty-one years ago) link