578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



laws, wlio would not let a man step over a stone in his path or 

 kiss not his neighbor's, but his own wife on a seventh day, no 

 more thought of prohibiting the drinking of liquor than of prohib- 

 iting the preaching of eight and ten hours' sermons. When they 

 settled a town, they built, first of all, a meeting house and, next 

 to it, a jail. The jail was for those who did not want to go to the 

 meeting house. But the pint of " new " rum per laborer in the 

 hayfield was as much a matter of course as the minister's madeira 

 or sherry, or the magistrate's metheglin or eggnog or toddy. In the 

 wainscoting around every fireplace was the sunken toddy-shelf to 

 be drawn out of evenings, and when a meeting house was to be 

 raised, the community were expected to drink as freely as Heaven 

 had blessed them in good things or the means to pay for them. So 

 lately as 1804, when the frame of the new meeting house in Brim- 

 field, Mass., was to be raised, the town voted $121.32 for "rum, 

 sugar, brandy, lemons, and wine " for the occasion. And there 

 are but few towns in Massachusetts that are smaller than Brim- 

 field. The Puritans, in their courts of justice, cited edicts and 

 precedents, not from the reporters, but from the Pentateuch, and 

 sent men to the jail or to the gibbet according to the laws of Reho- 

 boam or Jeroboam. But, because the sons of Rechab drank no 

 wine or strong drink, it no more occurred to them to forego wine 

 and strong drink themselves than it did to forsake their substan- 

 tial frame dwellings and camp out because these same Rechabites 

 had forsworn houses and lived in tents on the plains of Arabia 

 thirty centuries previously ! 



Liquor is legitimately and logically a subject of excise, and ex- 

 cise laws, which may operate in rem that is, against the thing 

 itself are proper and constitutional. But it would puzzle writers 

 upon constitutional law to find an origin for laws prohibiting the 

 manufacture or purchase or sale of an article of commerce, 

 though laws regulating all three are neither unconstitutional nor 

 improper. Besides unwritten and written or statute law, there is 

 also what is called the " police power " of a state or a community, 

 that is, the power of keeping the public peace. All three of these 

 jurisdictions may deal with the individual out of whom too much 

 liquor may have made a law-breaker. That is to say, the drunk- 

 ard has fractured the unwritten or moral law by breaking the rule 

 of temperance in all things. He has broken the written law by 

 becoming a public nuisance or a public charge, and the police 

 power of the State may lay hands upon him and lock him up for 

 being disorderly, or for lying drunk and so blocking up the public 

 streets that orderly persons may not pass and repass. But in what 

 manner or form the commodity we call liquor has broken or come 

 under the penal force of any one of these three jurisdictions, it is 

 difficult to imagine ; and, therefore, because this is a hard ques- 



