have seemed natural to the Fathers; be sure it would have seemed abnormal to them. Is this to say that the Founders of the Republic never looked forward to the time when every citizen would have his own conveyance, his own house with abundant furniture, when every wife and daughter would have silk garments and a piano to play upon like a princess? No; it might be said that this was precisely that to which they did look forward; this was an essential part of their expectation. Surely they saw a nation of free citizens in a land flowing with milk and honey, gradually lifting themselves to a new economic level; they saw that citizens would be educated to more and more comforts; that men's tastes would improve; that women would want better surroundings. But they could not foresee what has happened. They could not foresee at what a rate the machine would multiply things; they could not foresee how the prosperity indeed, the very existence - of the nation would come to depend upon people being forced to use what the machine pours out.

What is the first condition of our civilization? In the final reason, is it not concerned with the production of things? It is not that we must turn out large quantities of things; it is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last year, more next year than this; the flow from mill and mine must steadily increase. There are a thousand programmes cooking throughout the country, there are a thousand isms and causes and parties, each with its own notion of what must be done for the national good and the human good. Some of them are at war with each other, but at one point they are allies; some of them are worlds apart, speaking languages strange to each other yet one word they have in common. The minister in the pulpit cries out upon materialism, commer

cialization, science, politics, rum, divorce, the young folks. He offers this or that or the other as the cure. But no minister in any pulpit offers any cure which requires that what is called the nation's 'standard of living' sag back. The Capitalist and the Socialist are at each other's throats, but the issue between them is, Which can ensure the distribution of the most goods to the people? No statesman, no pacifist, no League-of-Nations enthusiast, would entertain his pet scheme for a moment longer if he believed it would mean that ten years later people would buy half of what they buy to-day. For the standard of living to sag back, for the people to buy but half of what they used to buy everybody knows that that means ruin, and not the ruin of business alone. The national prosperity gone, the national safety is in danger. This is not a fear; it is a fact. If anything were to happen to industry, there would be first confusion and then decline in all our institutions; our great system of free education for the nation would wither, our organized charities would dry up, the thorn and the nettle would spring up in our parks, our slums would become fever spots, our roads would fall into decay; more than all, our ideals of political authority would be a heap of jackstraws; we should hold the kind of government the Fathers gave us to be a broken reed.

Production has played many parts in history; it has taken various forms. The form which it takes in this, the Machine Age, is strange and new. Consumptionism is a new necessity. Consumptionism is a new science. Through the centuries, the problem has been how to produce enough of the things men wanted; the problem now is how to make men want and use more than enough things than enough things- 'the science of plenty,' it has been called. Formerly the task was to supply the things men

wanted; the new necessity is to make men want the things which machinery must turn out if this civilization is not to perish. To-day we dare not wait until men in their own good time get around to wanting the things; do we permit this, the machine flies to pieces. The wind blew and so the windmill went around. Under the new order, the windmill goes around and so the wind must blow. It is becoming a matter of general remark that the economic emphasis is changing; it is shifting from how to make things to how to dispose of the things that are made so that the machine can be kept in constant operation. The problem before us to-day is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more and more things. Consumptionism is bringing it about that the American citizen's first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.

The purpose of this paper is to point out how the new factor in our national life has already wrought recognizable changes in American democracy. There are some who believe that representative government has served America's purposes, and that in the new stage of her progress another form will serve her better; a few even say that democracy is not a good form for any good purpose. This paper does not attempt to argue such questions; it seeks only to show that already Consumptionism is making important changes in the American use of law, in the American Press, in the political freedom of the American citizen.

II

No great changes are ever the result of temporary conditions; they must have been long on their way; as Lord Halifax remarked, they are half made before it is plainly visible that men go

about them. Prohibition is the expression of a change which has been a century in forming. It is reasonable to explain why Prohibition happened to come in the year it did come rather than in some later or earlier year; but it is unreasonable to believe that but for this or that particular circumstance there would have been no Prohibition. It is unreasonable to believe that Prohibition is here because the church people and the fanatics caught the nation off its feet in war time, or because the young men were in France, or because the women had come to have an influence in public affairs.

The movement which now reveals itself in the form of Prohibition has been stretching its massive might through more than a hundred years. Men first saw the Temperance movement as something sentimental, as springing from religious and ethical convictions, as being a loving, spiritual force which moved against disease and poverty, against drunken husbands who beat their wives in hovels, against liquor dealers who prospered when their customers lay drunk in the gutter. Looking back upon it now from our vantage point, it is not difficult to see how this was but the superficial aspect of the Temperance movement; the deeper meaning can be seen showing through even in this initial stage. The demand, for example, that no child be robbed of its chance in life by parents who drank -did not this already suggest the movement's real character?

But it is in the shape which the Temperance movement next took that retrospection obtains a plainer view of its essential nature. For in the second half of the century the denunciation of drink for the cruelty and suffering it causes has dropped down to second place in the Temperance platform; now the first plank is the plank which describes the liquor traffic 'to be a nuisance and a

crime' because it is bad for the factory. Now the crime of drink is that it retards the worker's reactions, wastes his energies, endangers the costly machines he operates; drink, in short, keeps down the national output, and so deprives the nation of its full measure of prosperity. The voice of Temperance still sounds in church and in tabernacle, but it sounds louder now in the mill and on the railroad; it is still moral in guise, yet morality has now ceased to predominate. Temperance now presents itself as the agent of efficiency, as the friend of machinery.

This movement has been from the beginning a purposefully broadening stream. Narrow at first, only wide enough to take in the drunkards and wasters, the stream next broadened to include the workers, particularly those who worked with machinery. Finally with a great rush it swept out and reached everyone; no longer a stream, it became a sea. The twentieth century has seen it spread to include more than the nation's workers; the twentieth century has seen it reach out and take in the entire people.

What was it brought this latest extension of the Temperance movement? Was it still the needs of efficiency, and was Temperance but following the development of machinery, following the machine from the factory out upon the city streets and country roads? None but workmen used to run machines; today everybody runs machines: workmen, clerks, merchants, doctors, schoolteachers, men, women - everybody.

The automobile can be made to account for Prohibition plausibly enough. The argument runs easily along the line of the facts. So long as machinery was in the mill and on the railroads only, so long as the question of drink lay between employers and workmen, there was authority enough in the pay envelope to command abstinence where

abstinence was needed. But machinery on the streets and on the roads, machinery tended not by workers but by citizens, creates altogether another problem. The authority of the pay envelope does not reach to the citizens on the streets; only the authority of Government can reach to them. The factories turn out four million motor cars in a year. With this amazing development a saloon on each corner and a drinkingplace at every crossroads do not quite fit. A man refuses to contemplate the prospect of his wife and child in daily danger of being run into by the driver whose eyes are blurred and whose hands are unsteadied by drink. Machinery becomes more and more necessary to existence; if existence is to be safe, the use of machinery must be attended with safety. Was, then, the attainment of safety the ultimate purpose of the Temperance movement? Had it no further goal than this? Is the Eighteenth Amendment thus to be accounted for? The argument does not go far enough.

The deep purpose of the Temperance movement was no more to provide safety for citizens than it was to provide efficiency for workers or morals for drunkards. These were incidentals. Had the only need been to do away with drunkenness and immorality and the brewers' white horses, private philanthropy and public opinion had amply sufficed without going so far as an Eighteenth Amendment. The factories and the railroads took care of their drink problem; they needed none of Government's thunderbolts. And as for the safety of citizens upon streets and roads swarming with automobiles, would not the police and the people between them have managed without invading the Constitution? Between Government's power to punish drunken drivers and the people's fear of being hurt by drunken drivers, would not the streets and roads eventually have be

come reasonably safe? To be sure, this corrective fear of the people would have meant a less great consumption of automobiles; accidents would have considerably restrained the passion of the people for this new convenience; the increase in the number of cars on the streets would have been not stupendous but gradual. True, this would have meant that four million cars could not have been sold in 1923. But Prohibition was not merely the response to the need for disposing of four million automobiles in 1923.

The Eighteenth Amendment was the response to closer pressing Consumptionism. Prohibition is not here for the sake of the automobile industry; the automobile is but one member among many. When Mr. Henry Ford, who is a man born into his time, says we must give up either drink or industrialism, he is not moved to say so merely because drink would make people buy fewer automobiles. Instinctively he understands that drink makes people buy less of everything, and so less of automobiles. When Mr. Gary says that drink and prosperity are incompatible, he is not moved to his conclusion by mere questions of efficiency in the steel mills.

Consumptionism is the science of intensifying consumption. It is not enough that the desire for this or that particular thing be made to increase; desire must not run into any blind alleys; every thing of any kind in the great variety of our output must be able to stimulate the appetite for more things of every kind; consumption is all interrelated, feeding upon itself and stupendously growing by that it feeds upon. Under the old order, the products of brewery and distillery added up in the prosperity columns just as steel did, and ploughs, and corn; beer and liquor were equal with all the others. Under the new order, drink subtracts

from the total. Drink cuts down general consumptive power. Drink takes from the nation's ability to use up goods; drink takes from a man's efficiency to consume; drink lessens the desire for things. Drink, to be sure, limits its own consumption; when it has its man under the table, that is the end; there is a limit to the amount a man can drink. But what is intolerable is that drink makes inroads into the consumption of all else. Consumptionism cannot suffer drink because in drink men find a substitute for that satisfaction which is in the acquiring of luxuries; the pleasure in drink takes the place of the pleasure in things. The more things men have, the more they need this is the working philosophy of Consumptionism. The more drink men have, the less things they need. Consequently we have the Eighteenth Amendment.

There is a righteous resentment of Prohibition. Lawyers, for example, cry out that 'something must be done about Prohibition'; politicians, men in office, publicists, political philosophers, are genuinely alarmed by what they call the Prohibition mess. Prohibition is seen by this sort of men to be a failure; the country has tried Prohibition and found it cannot be enforced; to keep it longer in the basic law of the land is to incur gravest risk; something must be done, they reiterate - what they mean is that something must be done to preserve the integrity of Gov

ernment.

In other quarters, however, there are a great many people, not inevitably Prohibitionists, who are for Prohibition to-day, a large class who never had any moral convictions or any sentimental notions about drinking. These do not see Prohibition as a failure or a menace. Perhaps they once believed that wines and beers must be restored, but they are doubtful now if they would lend their votes to even

a wine-and-beer modification. These citizens see how the liquor laws go widely disregarded; some of them do themselves disregard the laws; they know all about the bootleggers and the stills; they see the struggles of Government. And they are satisfied; they are complacent. According to the rules, Prohibition has proved not enforceable. But they find it well enough enforced for all that; they may not be able to put their finding into words but instinctively they feel it. 'Enforced' what do they mean by 'enforced'? The Eighteenth Amendment makes liquor dear; a man's circumstances do the rest; his circumstances enforce Prohibition so far as it needs to be enforced for the purposes of Consumptionism. Those who break the law

what do they amount to in the view of Consumptionism? For mostly those who can afford bootleggers and roadhouses are already provided to the point of saturation with furs and motor cars and entertainments; it is the millions with the hankering for these things still hot within them who matter just now to Consumptionism. From this point of view, Prohibition has proved a success, not a failure at all. If it were not for Prohibition, less money would today be going to the department stores, the garages, the movies, the bookshops. There are more lawbreakers in the nation because of Prohibition. But because of Prohibition there are both more consumers and better consumers. A great number of America's citizens, and the number does not decrease, feel that it is the consumers who count first to America.

Those who go through the land crying out that 'something must be done about Prohibition' imply that Prohibition was a mistake, a slip, a misadventure. They imply that the difficulty of getting rid of Prohibition is not very much more than a legal difficulty.

Prohibition was not made by a mistake; it was made by a movement. It was not American democracy that needed Prohibition. The purpose of Prohibition was not to make more valuable citizens. The purpose was to make more valuable consumers. If more valuable consumers could be made only at an expense to citizenship, at an expense to democracy, at an expense to Americanism, it could not be helped; Consumptionism had to be considered first; all else has come to depend upon Consumptionism.

Prohibition is the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But it is not of the same stuff as the other amendments. Prohibition is the first Consumptionist amendment.

III

Turn now to the Press. "The Press is the chief democratic instrument of freedom,' wrote De Tocqueville. Americans have truly believed it.

Something has happened to the Press. All have remarked it. What is it? Radicals have no difficulty in putting their finger on it; they can tell you that the advertisers and the 'Interests' control the newspapers, that is what the trouble is. The Radicals are a generation behind their time. The conservative citizens have their own way of saying it; they say the whole trouble is that the Press has become commercialized, and by 'commercialized' they mean that greedy men have used the newspapers to make great fortunes for themselves. And this explanation is, on the whole, no more accurate than the explanations from the soap-boxes. It is obvious to anybody who turns over the forty pages of his morning newspaper, nearly every page half advertising, that the newspapers do make a great deal of money. In scores of communities the newspaper is now as profitable as the