Cornell on Prohibition

Declaring that prohibition is a "stupit compromise in which liquor is forbidden in order to please the drys, and obtainable in order to satisfy the wets," and stating with commendable simplicity that "the majority of students, at least in the East, have been breaking the (prohibition) law," The Harvard Crimson has enlisted the aid of the Harvard Debating Council in a crusade to rid the country of the existing enforcement laws for the Eighteenth Amendment. The debators have formulated their own "plan for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment," and the journalists are laboring mightily to crystallize undergraduate opinion behind a definite plan of prohibition reform."

This newest action of the sons of fair Harvard is, in a sense, only an additional straw on the great load of protest which has been heaped on the present prohibition legislation during the past few weeks. But it might conceivably prove to be the straw which would break the back of the hard-ridden camel of dry enactments. The Crimson is well aware that there are a million undergraduates in colleges and universities in the United States; it is equally well aware that these students will be leaders of national affairs in a few years. The editors hope that the sentiments of these million people can be unified, and that the effect will be to hasten the change which they feel confident must come eventually.

The Debating Council plan, specifically, is this. All present federal legislation for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment shall be repealed; Congress shall make unlawful the operation of all saloons and ale-houses; federal aid shall be provided for all states enacting legislation to enforce the eighteenth amendment; there shall be federal education to foster and encourage temperance and abstinence; a federal tax shall be placed on some beverages to provide funds to effect items three and four. The Crimson knows that it cannot get a million undergraduates to endorse this plan; but it wants above all else to unite an enormously powerful public opinion behind some definite scheme for the remedy of an existing evil.

The Crimson has inaugurated a movement which, if the actuality even approximates the vision, should exert a real and vital influence on the men who direct the policies of the nation. Whatever else it may do, the experiment will furnish valuable information as to the direct effect which the expressed opinion of a mass of people can have on the laws which are to govern them. The Cornell Sun.