Leadership Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Jarvis is selling prohibition as the sober, reasonable middle ground, and that’s the sleight of hand. The line begins with a moral consensus he assumes you already share: “We have seen the evil.” Not “some harms,” not “abuse,” but “evil” - a word that collapses messy social realities into a single villain. Once liquor is framed as a contaminant “in our midst,” prohibition stops being a policy choice and becomes a cleansing act, a way to restore order inside the community’s borders.

Then comes the pitch-perfect political hedge: “let us try.” Jarvis doesn’t demand a permanent regime; he proposes a trial run, an experiment. That phrasing does two things at once. It lowers the emotional cost for skeptics (you’re not voting for forever) while shifting the burden of proof onto opponents (why not test it if the problem is so obvious?). The promise is vague but potent: “see what this will do for us.” The “us” is doing quiet work, implying a unified public interest while sidestepping who pays the price - saloonkeepers, immigrant communities, working-class leisure, even the enforcement apparatus that prohibition would inevitably expand.

In late-19th- and early-20th-century politics, temperance was as much about social discipline as public health: anxieties over urbanization, labor unrest, and changing gender norms flowed into the bottle. Jarvis’s sentence is compact because it’s designed for coalition: moral reformers hear righteousness, pragmatists hear experimentation, and everyone hears an invitation to treat a complex economic and cultural ecosystem like a switch you can simply flip off.