THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MARCH, 1894. 



ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 



By APPLETON MORGAN. 



THE creation of crimes by means of statutes providing for 

 their punishment has generally proved itself bad policy. In 

 the days of Henry VIII it was the maxim that " a tinker was a 

 rogue by statute " ; and in Queen Elizabeth's time actors and 

 " stage-players " were put into the same category as tinkers. But 

 it came in time to be understood that the soldering of tin kettles 

 was not a crime because a tinker here and there had robbed a hen- 

 roost, and that the profession which had produced a Shakespeare 

 was not, by any salutary public policy, a criminal profession. 



The absolute, unqualified, and distinguished failure of all laws 

 for the abolishment of the traffic in liquors is speedily convincing 

 even the most sanguine prohibitionist of the expediency of wiping 

 them from every statute-book in the land. Their failure has not 

 been so much a protest against interference with the personal 

 liberty of the citizen as an illustration of the venerable maxim 

 that no law can exist without, or can survive, a reason for its 

 existence. These laws, indeed, never had any adequate or logical 

 reason for existing at all. They have had their origins always 

 and without exception in sparsely settled communities where per- 

 sonal liberty was so absolute and unquestioned that it became irk- 

 some, where liquor was almost unknown and the user of it a curi- 

 osity, and where the only knowledge of the horrors of intoxica- 

 tion the village possessed was derived from itinerant temperance 

 orators who dilated upon the terrible consequences of the rum 

 habit to a roomful of tearful old women, none of whom knew the 

 taste of liquor or of anything stronger than green tea. The early 

 Puritans of New England, who enacted the most ferocious of blue 



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