Henderson Daily Dispatch

OTHERS' VIEWS
BLAMES IT ALL ON
PROHIBITION
To the Editor:
I wrote a letter to the Daily Dispatch, about ten years ago that I thought settled the prohibition question for ever. Yet it seems there are still a few, good-intentioned, but misguided brothers who imagine they still see some merits in the eighteenth amendment, and for the benefit of those who have not leaped the bounds of mercy, I would like to add another chapter to that great drama.
Every sane, thinking, rational minded individual, who has tried to keep history straight knows beyond a reasonable doubt, that all the ills that have befallen the United States, in the last few years, are traceable, directly to the eighteenth amendment.
In order to enact and retain the eighteenth amendment it was necessary to fill the Congress of the United States with a festering mass of uninformed eccentrics, steeped in crime and reeking in putrefaction. and under the mis-rule of this fanatical Congress the laboring masses of the United States were reduced to bondage, a thousand times worse than ever imposed by the house of Pharaoh on the children of Israel--this language may sound harsh, but God knows it is no harsher than their record--when the children of Israel decided to leave Egypt they borrowed golden jewels, from the Egyptians in sufficient abundance to fashion a golden calf. But during the reign of Volsteadism the laborer couldn't get the captains of industry to stand surety at the corner grocery store for a loaf of bread, much less borrow their golden trinkets.
The Anti-Saloon League should have been abolished in its infancy with the White Caps, Night Riders and other such organizations, as it was decidedly the worst of all. There is not a crime in the catalogue of criminology that can't be traced directly to the doors of the Anti-Saloon League. They have undermined the very fundamental principles on which this government was established, autonomy, state's rights and personal liberty; they have undermined the morale of the country by placing in authority ignorant and irresponsible prohibition agents who made it dangerous to travel on the public highways and by using federal appropriations to hire men to bear false witness against their neighbors; they have polluted the streams of knowledge, by placing in the free schools a physiology that teaches a doctrine as false as the election returns from a republican precinct; they have undermined the health of an entire generation by annulling the pure food and drugs act and placing a deadly poison in all foods and drugs that had required an alcoholic preservative, that finally precipitated a national epidemic of Jake paralysis; they have undermined the Holy Bible, by declaring in the national prohibition party platform "That Jesus Christ was ignorant of the fact that he was laying a bad example for future generations when he made and drank wine at a wedding feast;" thus casting aside the old sacred Bible and wringing from the bosom of heaven the last faint star that gleams in the horizon of human hope or human despair.
H. L. ALLEN,
Harriet Cotton Mills,
Henderson, Sept. 24, 1933.