Item #2293 Popular Questions. The Prohibition Reform. Its Practicality by Enactment of Law. By a Clergyman. California, Prohibition.
Popular Questions. The Prohibition Reform. Its Practicality by Enactment of Law. By a Clergyman

Popular Questions. The Prohibition Reform. Its Practicality by Enactment of Law. By a Clergyman

San Francisco: Jos. Winterburn & Co., 1886. 14pp., plus advertisement leaf. Original printed wrappers bound into 20th-century black quarter leather and marbled boards. Erased signature and small inked numeral to front wrapper. Very good plus. Item #2293

A rare California entry in the ongoing 19th-century and early-20th century debate over the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The "Clergyman" author argues that "all people of good moral judgment wish to see the total abolition of intemperance," but stops short of calling for a legal prohibition of alcohol. The author argues that "a law of itself has no power." Rather, the author compares a law prohibiting alcohol with the abolition of slavery, stating that "American slavery was not abolished by prohibitory enactment" but "by the prevailing sense of justice among the people." So shall it be with alcohol, they argue, as prohibition laws against alcohol in states like Kansas are "already becoming lax and futile."

The author also comments on the futility of prohibition in the Golden State: "Still other forms of temporal grace, thus far unknown, will be promulgated by new temperance sects called into existence by the drunkenness of the future.... In California, where the wine interests are very extensive, and growing constantly more so; where one city largely controls the state; and where the population is so much mixed as to render it impossible to get any concert of action on a moral question, legislation to prohibit the sale of liquor is past all reasonable hope." OCLC locates only one copy, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Price: $850.00