THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 213
constant demand of the habitual or besotted drunkard to the weak and intermittent demand of the man who uses liquor some- what as he uses olives or citron or malted milk. Third, the inter- est in personal freedom. There are always people in considerable numbers who want to do whatever others presume to say they ought not to do. This faction includes elements from hopeless moral perversity to highly developed moral refinement. Fourth, bust ness interests not directly connected with the liquor traffic : belief that trade follows the bartender ; desire to keep solid with the interests directly dependent upon the liquor traffic ; competition with other towns that are said to draw away trade by favoring liquor sellers, etc. Fifth, political interests, desire to use the liquor interest for personal or party ends. Sixth, social interests. Friends are directly or indirectly interested in the liquor traffic, and influence must go in their favor, from the negative kind that allows hands to be tied and mouths closed, to the positive kind that manipulates influence of every sort to obstruct the opera- tion of the law. Seventh, legitimate business interests.
This rough analysis of the situation shows that, instead of two simple factors, viz., law and the violation, we are really dealing with a strangely assorted collection of interests, awk- wardly struggling to express themselves in theory and in prac- tice. We are not arguing the question how to deal with the liquor traffic, and we are not implying an opinion one way or the other about prohibitory laws. We are simply showing that, whether we are dealing with one kind of a law or another, we may be very uncritical about the ultimate factors involved. The two facts in question, viz., the law and the violation, prove to be in reality the selfsame persons expressing different ele- ments of their own interests. The father of the prohibitory policy has been known to plead with a judge not to pass sen- tence on a liquor seller in accordance with his own law. The same persons who sustain the law also violate the law in some of the different degrees of violating and sustaining referred to above. The law on the one hand, and the violation on the other, are nothing but shadows, or apparitions, or accidents, except as they reflect the actual balance of interests present in
