Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/31

 of being a private engineer are immense; but we have hardly begun to recognize what they are.

For example: those who protest against the enforcement of prohibition declare that drinking is a matter of private morals within the field of personal liberty; and they assert that opposition to drinking rests upon Puritan principles which they do not accept—which have never been a part of their beliefs. Very well. Let us drop "Puritanism," whatever its injunctions may be in this connection. Let us merely ask the liquor champions whether they believe in automobiles and in automobiling. Let us ask them whether they know that we killed some twenty thousand of our fellow-citizens last year in automobile accidents, a considerable number of them due to drunken drivers.

The indicated approach for the reformer is to show the essential incompatibility of either licensed saloons or bootlegging joints with an automobiling civilization. If we really believe in crowding the roads of the country with private engineers running private cars at twenty to sixty miles an hour, the whole question of drinking ceases to be a question of personal liberty. To protect our lives, we shall be obliged to prevent our—ten million private engineers from getting drunk. We have got to make the same exaction of private engineers that we long ago made of public engineers.

I will present one more characteristic of our national type. I drove last summer five hundred miles through Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and!