WRITINGS (continued 6)

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Is Prohibition Paternalistic? (1919)

The history of temperance reform is largely a story of vilification. Those who have championed it have been steadily accused by the promoters of the liquor industry. They have resorted to these things for the want of better arguments. When mind reaches its limit it often abdicates in favor of temper. Argument exhausted, the stores of abuse are open. The liquor interests have drawn an utterly impossible picture of the temperance reformer, and have tried to create in the public mind a complete misconception of his purpose and motive.

The reform agitator may not always have fully appreciated the viewpoint of the man on the other side of the question. It is certain that the latter has seldom given much evidence of appreciating the position of the agitator. Whether or not it has been intentional, most of the protests coming from the liquor interests have originated in a misunderstanding of the attitude of the people who are striving for a sober land.

This misunderstanding was unnecessary. It would also have been impossible had really earnest and sincere thought been given the question. Thinking is not always the order of the day, however, when either profit or appetite is involved. There are still many people to whom life simply means blind following of the crowd and meek obedience to the dictates of superficial opinion. Comparatively few are accustomed to apply the keen edge of reason to each proposition. Had more defenders of the saloon cultivated this habit, the liquor problem would have perished of anaemia.

One of the cries raised in the rather recent past was that no sumptuary legislation should be permitted. Political parties were in the habit of writing into their platforms from year to year the statement that they were opposed to all such enactment. This declaration seldom failed to garner a harvest of votes from the self-styled liberal element.

It was cheap and easy to make such a declaration, but it would not have been so easy to bolster it up with any reasonable defence. In the light of deeper thought, such a position appears not only unreasonable and ridiculous, but vicious and perilous as well.

Were one to search the criminal code from the beginning to the end he could find no law which does not partake of the sumptuary nature. In one way or another, each provision sets a limit for human liberty. Each tells the citizen of a thing which he may not do and remain safe from the hand of the law. It does not do so because society wants to prescribe the rules of private conduct to be followed by any individual member. It does so because it must protect its peaceful members against the trespasses of those who do not regard the rights of others.

The law against burglary, for instance, is really a sumptuary measure. It limits liberty at the point of taking the property of other people. No one complains of the injustice of such a law. The menace of burglary, however, does not compare with the menace which the saloon system has been.

The law which prevents one man from selling and another from buying powerful narcotic and poisonous drugs is also a sumptuary provision. It limits human liberty at the point of eating and drinking. Seldom does any one complain about it. No other poison, however, has occupied so prominent a place and wrought such widespread havoc as has alcohol.

The saloonkeeper has harmed society more than has the burglar. He should therefore suffer at least an equal degree of restraint. Liquor has worked more damage than has any other article of common sale. There is, therefore, no reason why its manufacture and sale should not be affected by at least the same safeguards as those surrounding the manufacture and distribution of other dangerous drugs.

A kindred complaint from the liquor champions has been that the government shows increasing signs of the spirit of paternalism. The contention is that the prohibition reformer represents a meddlesome class who want to control the lives of others. As is the case with the first claim mentioned, this proposition needs but a second look. No proper government and no thoughtful citizen desires the mere power to control the conduct of other people. Especially have we tried to foster the spirit of freedom in America. No one who loves his country wants unduly to destroy or interfere with the liberty for which the nation stands.

The word freedom, however, must not suffer a wrong interpretation. Freedom needs to recognize its own proper limits, and it will do so in any properly organized social system. Such a measure as the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of liquor is not paternalism. It is merely the protection of the individual by the group.

The only freedom which any man, good or bad, can justly claim is the freedom which ends at the point of injury to another. No one has any right to deny such a measure of liberty to any man. No one has the right to claim any measure of liberty beyond it.

The reformers so often accused of efforts at paternalism have really had no thought of limiting the freedom of any one beyond this line of democratic necessity. They have not been looking at the question from that angle. They have been thinking neither of liberty nor of the lack of it. Their consideration has not been so much the imagined rights of the sinning as it has been the real rights of those sinned against. The limit to freedom which prohibition implies is only one which should have been set long ago by the reasonable thinking of amiable humanity. It is a rather pitiful fact that it became necessary to have laws to do what the rational conscience had failed to do.

The fact that the innocent have been protected against a man and that he has been protected against himself gives him no right to insist that his liberties have been unjustly curtailed. He has only been aided in the interpretation of liberty in such a way as to be able to see that it belongs to others as well as to himself.

Those who have braved the storm of misjudgment and abuse, so often the portion of one who tries to be true to a great trust, did not seek the destruction of any business nor the poverty of any class of men. The thought which spurred them on was that of cheerless firesides, of hungry stomachs, of shivering bodies, of dwarfed and neglected lives, and of the threatened blight of a nation. It was not a question of paternalism. It was one of protection.

When the nation has banished the saloon from its every nook and corner, as it will soon do, no one can justly say that ours has become a paternalistic government. Our government will simply have taken a forward step in the fundamental task of any government—the service and protection of its people.

When one finds another with a bottle of poison to his lips or with a gun to his temple, no one calls him a meddler for striking the threatening menace to the ground. In prohibition legislation, the national government will only have stricken aside the weapon in time to preserve many a man from destruction. Unborn generations will thus be saved from a curse which has long hounded the human race.

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Vibration as a Basis of Invention (1919)

The person who would give to the world some great invention must not deceive himself into thinking that he can do it by creative processes. It is not our function to create. It is our province only to adapt the laws and forces already in existence to our needs. The process is really a relative rather than a creative one. The laws and forces are here. It is our work to relate ourselves to them. One cannot build a machine that will do anything. He can only construct a mechanism through which the already existing laws of nature can operate.

Another mistake apt to be made by the amateur, and one which will lead him farther away from instead of nearer to success, is the entertainment of the notion that a wonderful mechanism must necessarily be complex. The wonderful thing about nature, after all, is its simplicity. The mechanism which is to establish a point of contact between us and a force of nature must be as simple in its principle as the force itself.

The notable thing about almost any of our great inventions is the simplicity of their design and operative principle. After observing the action of any of them, one is quite apt to turn away and inwardly remark that he could have done the same thing himself if he had only thought of it. Of course, the chief approach to any notable achievement is the matter of thinking of it. Most of us do not think of these things, and the reason is often the fact that we are looking for something complex when the real principle is very simple.

The problem of the would-be inventor or discoverer, then, is not one of adding something to the universe as it stands. His work is to ponder the forces that have long operated and the laws by which they have operated, and then relate his work to some one of them. One of the chief of these, and one upon which some of our notable inventions have been based, is the universal fact of vibration.

The first great inventions which are based upon the vibration theory were made long before any of us were born, and each of us has been given a free sample of both. One is named the eye, while the other is known as the ear. So far as that is concerned, the work of the actual nerves at the surface of the skin is based upon the same principle.

The other day in a medical laboratory I was examining a dissection of the human head made with a view to showing the nerves in their relation to the spinal trunk and to the brain. The brain had been removed down to where its base rests upon the spinal stem. I was not so much interested in the countless fibers running off from the entire length of the spinal cord nearly so much as the two sets of nerves which have to do with seeing and hearing. Off from the spinal stem, just below the base of the brain, two large nerves ran forward to the eyes, and two other large ones ran aside to the ears. These were the optic and the auditory nerves, respectively.

These are the means which the Ruling Genius of the universe has established by which the person may maintain his contact with the outward world. One of these sets takes up vibrations and reports them in terms of light. The other takes vibrations and reports them in terms of sound. The two sets look almost precisely alike. The means by which they are made to distinguish vibrations into these two different forms of interpretation remains a mystery, unless it be that they are made sensitive only to given lengths and types of waves.

The eye was the first camera, and the inventor of the photographic process necessarily had to base his work on precisely the same principle. A sensitive surface had to be provided; a means had to be established whereby it might receive and be affected by ether vibrations of given lengths; then the result, which in the case of the eye is so temporary, had to be chemically fixed and thereby rendered permanent.

The phonographic process is related to the vibration theory of sound just as the photographic process is based upon the wave theory of light. A phonographic record is simply the photograph of a sound. A surface had to be provided which was capable of receiving the record of the vibrations which make a given sound. The means had to be provided by which they could be permanently recorded there. Then a mechanism capable of reproducing them made the phonograph complete. The same effect was produced upon the ear as would have been produced by the original vibrations themselves. Thereby the thing which is fleeting and temporary to the ear was rendered more or less permanent. These two inventions proved once and for all the truth of the theories on which they were based.

Telegraphy and telephony, both ordinary and wireless, are likewise based upon phases of the vibration principle. Each in its day has been revolutionary. We are, however, only upon the threshold of achievement in these vibratory means of communication. Each is simple, when once achieved, because each is based on ordinary and everyday laws of nature. Those who are improving upon the processes already established are not those who are trying to find different paths. They are those who are seeking a closer acquaintance with natural laws as they are, and who are seeking better ways of relating ourselves to those laws. We cannot alter natural forces. We can only improve upon their use.

There is a great field for scientific and inventive progress of an intensive nature. As we move forward in the effort to gain a little firmer hold upon natural processes, we find ourselves able to throw away today equipment which was very necessary yesterday. First, we could carry communication farther and better with metal media between the communicating points. Now we do it equally well without the artificial media.

A few years ago a scientist announced that he could accumulate, concentrate, and unloose a vibratory force sufficient to wreck the planet on which we live. Should anyone want to do such a thing, and should the rest of the world be willing, there is little doubt that such a thing would be possible. There is probably no limit to the harm that could be done by harnessing up the ever-present vibrations to an evil end. Neither is there any limit to the good they can be made to do when intelligently turned to worthy purposes.

Probably the statement of the scientist mentioned above was, after all, only a part of the truth. Someone has said that one cannot move his finger without displacing the elements of the universe all the way to the farthest star. Vibration is not only here but everywhere. It carries light to us from so far that years are required for the journey. It is not inconceivable that it might be made to do the same with sound.

Certainly it could be made to do the same with ideas if two conditions could be fulfilled. First, there would have to be living and intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe. Second, there would have to be a common code or basis of interpretation between ourselves and them. About the first, we do not know. As to the second, no one yet sees how to accomplish such a thing. Archimedes could have moved the world with a lever if he had only had a place to stand, but of course he did not have it, so the possibility was spoiled. The principle of the lever, however, held just as good as though the impossible condition could have been fulfilled. Likewise, the law of vibrations would permit of a system of wireless out into the reaches of space. The difficulty is not with the law.

Nature probably holds some provision for our every want. We need only to establish the means by which she can deliver her gifts to us. The universe thrills with life and action. Out of its heartthrobs we shall be able to gather many a blessing.

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