Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/254

 pating that the legislative hand will be withheld wherever law-making appears the simplest and most obvious method of getting rid of any crying evil: and there can be no doubt that the abuse of alcohol is an evil of precisely the sort that legislature will be active in suppressing. Some changes in the method of government will have to take place before Parliament can legislate against alcohol: but that it will so legislate before the middle of this century is morally certain. In what country the alcohol law is first likely to be passed is immaterial. Every country which adopts it will thereby assist in forcing the same measure upon other countries, because, with international travel constantly becoming cheaper and more easy, it is certain that numerous people who object to being deprived of stimulants and intoxicants in one country will migrate to others where their appetite can have full play, and will intensify the drink problem in those countries until these, too, are forced, or will think themselves forced, to legislate in self-protection. Thus such laws will become universal. No doubt this condition will be reached gradually, measures of restriction preceding measures of prohibition. But the end will be the same, and it will be forced upon the world as much by the increased evils inflicted by alcohol on nerves increasingly susceptible to its influence, as by any other consideration.