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Show THE CITIZEN 4 Why don't the League want all nations to belong to it! Why was it framed for only Great Britain, France Italy, Japan and the United States! It looks like a royal flush in a poker game, and appears to have been conceived by some brilliant mind to link these five big nations together and in a few years gobble up all the countries of the world. Tlie people of this country did not want to join the league because they do not like war, murder and destruction. In Europe it is different. They have been fighting over there for over two thousand years and are still fighting, and will continue to fight because of their present system of negative government intrigue, secret treaties, jealousy, greed and ambition for gold and territorial control, and a thousand and one other things, that we never dream of in this country. When an individual seeks power, look out for him. When a nation seeks power, look out for it. To gain power, a few lives means nothing, because those who are making the real gain are sitting behind protection and enjoying the spoils of the conquered. Live and let live, should be the motto of every states- man. PROHIBITION In a concise statement of facts, commenting editorially reupon prohibition and its effect upon the nation and ultimate sults, The Christian Science Watchman, the official organ of the Christian Science Parent Church of the New Generation says : A boiling tea kettle does not explode because the unsealed lid automatically lifts, permits the steam to escape, and lessens the pressure. A sealed jar containing fermenting substances will explode because it lias no safety outlet for the expanding gases released by slow fermentation. A man or a nation will explode when the fervent heat of resistance within the individual or collective body pent-u- p reaches tlie limit of moral control. A brain storm of anger an explosion, a crime wave, individual or collective lawlessness, war and violence, all are of the same identical parentage. They are the visible and destructive effects on the plane of physical ilfe and action produced by an accumulated surplus of destructive thought force in the unseen mental realm, finding outlet after the collective mentality has reached its mental saturation point. The time is not far distant when the physical scientist will recognize that destructive immoral forces humanly manifested in lawlessness, crime, war, and pestilence are directly related to the destructive manifestation in nature expressed in cyclones, earthquakes, and lightning. A legalized national collective prohibition or compulsion relating to anything can only deal with human action on the physical plane what men do or do not. It should be obvious that no form of legislative prohibition or compulsion can control thinking. Prohibition is the father of physical force and violence. It creates the mental cause of lawlessness which requires more force in the vain attempt to control its own creation and finally finds that such immoral force can only end in weakness, disaster and dissolution. No human government can control the gathering force of an accumulation of unseen thoughts of millions craving alcoholic beverages when that force bursts the bounds of legal ability for moral enforcement. No intelligent person will today deny that the mental element controls all bodily action and life in the individual. Therefore, the mental element must also control the life of the multiplied individual the Nation. Reason must then .convince all that morbid cravings or unsatisfied longings in the minds of the people for that which is prohibited thought sealed up without safety yalve:?i?entilator accumulates in the national mentality, sioly, jprhaps, but nevertheless surely, a force more powerful and uncontrollable than its symbolic physical counterpart, fermentation in a sealed ' jar. Every form' of visible life is seeking the kind of satisfaction believed to be necessary for its greatest good. Millions of individual unoffending citizens honestly her lieve that certain kinds of alcoholic beverages in strictly moderate quantities are essential to their health and happiness. If this is considered by a majority of the people a mistaken viewpoint, the remedy according to truly American standards is for the higher viewpoint to educate the lower, while wisely controlling excesses by individual penalties Required under just civil codes; thus step by step legislating byr4he. only effective power of the State, the common consent of the people, until un-- ? restrained passions and appetites are not only held in check, but' at least measurably dissolved, and true temperance becomes a 1 .... national characteristic. A majority, or even a substantial minority in a state or a great city, cannot be indicted arid punished. ' The attempt would mean little less than civil war. Therefore, the rapidly approaching stage of open defiance of prohibition, especially in certain communities, would, unless reversed in time, ultimate in the collapse of law and order and a paralysis of government with all that such a catastrophe would involve. The United Sttaes will awaken to the magnitude of its mistake as soon as it gains a broader vision of the problem by considering and analyzing the mental elements involved according to the Science of mental formation. This United Sttaes is not primarily a geographical outline nor an aggregation of resources and personalities these are secondarv effects. It is a collective, ceaselessly evolving, composite state of mind, an unfolding consciousness in which is being solved the great problem of collective unity of purpose, ideal, and action upon a gigantic scale. When a national consciousness which has been tirelessly edr ucated in the recognition of the inherent individual rights of reason and conscience commences to awaken to the fact that a substantial portion of its citizenship is failing in pracice to maintain this cherished national ideal, it automatically recoils from either compulson or prohibition on any issue which it intuitively recognizes as a question involving those rights of reason and conscience. Let us not forget that the United States was founded by the Pilgrim Fathers upon their rejection of the doctrine of prohibition as applied to religious liberty. Mutiny and violence are the inevitable result of any form of legalized collective prohibition believed by a majority or a substantial minority to be tyrannical and oppressive. The assent of a people to any form of collective prohibition automatically initiates a process of moral, mental, and social dis- integration. Phvsical force follows the lines of least resistance. There- fore, the criminal underworld intuitively and automatically became the first solid bloc of active resistance to a morally vulnerable and ultimately destructive statute. It sensed the unlimited financial possibilities. An army of a million bootleggers, rum runners, and other makers and purveyors of liquified poison are one hundred per cent against prohibition modification ! Mental fermentation is being stimulated by the earnest and honest, but mistaken, support of a great army of America's best citizenship not actually identified with the cohorts of professional, heoretical, commercialized reform. q They have riot as yet recognized that the damage done by moral failure to enforce a statutory law far outweighs benefits gained from an assumed morality based upon the abstract theory of having adopted a high moral national standard. 9f hi-jacke- rs, |