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Wednesday, March 20, 1918
State senator George B. Wellington of Troy urges his legislative colleagues to ratify the constitutional amendment prohibiting alcoholic beverages throughout the United States, but sees the vote delayed by at least another day.
Wellington has been wrangling with the senate’s taxation and retrenchment committee, which wants to put a state prohibition amendment before the voters. He has criticized the state amendment as a poison-pill document designed to be more extreme than the federal amendment and too extreme for New Yorkers.
Opponents of prohibition have argued that the legislature shouldn’t vote on the federal amendment until New York voters have expressed their opinion on the subject. Wellington answers that the last seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified by the state legislature without any popular vote.
If the senate refuses to vote on ratification, Wellington says that “there will be furnished a concrete example of the way that ‘invisible government’ [of party bosses and lobbyists] works through the agency of its representatives in this Senate…. Then will be revealed the working of a pernicious system that can at will deny to any subject a hearing on the merits. Such a system is neither democracy nor an intelligent autocracy.”
While critics predict a sig- nificant loss of revenue with the end of liquor taxes, Wellington believes that will be a price worth paying if it results in healthier, more efficient citizens.
“Drink is an ogre that delights to ruin men,” the Troy senator says, “It is the father of poverty and crime. It glories in destruction. It laughs at distress. It rejoices at horrors. It loves to see women weep. It sneers at the wail of children.
“During the last century more lives have been lost, more careers wrecked, more families impoverished and ruined, more women and children subjected to unutterable disgrace, more poverty inflicted upon the nation, more disease and crime introduced and nourished in human beings through this traffic than from all other causes combined, including all our wars.
“Drink is an autocrat of enormous power…. This autocrat is more powerful than any autocrat in Europe, and he and his agents would not hesitate a moment to lose the [world] war, to turn this nation over to its enemies, to enslave every man, woman and child within our borders if only he could get for his labor the price of the drinks.”
Wellington believes that prohibition will have a positive and permanent influence on the nation. “If national prohibition be enacted and enforced,” he predicts, “probably the third generation after us will not know what the taste of intoxicating liquor is.”