ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. S79 



tion to answer, it is difficult to find a legal or logical origin for a 

 prohibitory liquor law. Publicists assure us that all salutary laws 

 and statutes which, have proved to be for the general good are 

 found to have invariably come from a demand for protection, or 

 for warrant from an individual or a class asking either for pro- 

 tection or for franchise to benefit the state and himself by carry- 

 ing on some useful business, art, or trade ; or they have been en- 

 acted for the raising of revenue, or (as I have said above) for the 

 conservation of the public peace. But not of such have been the 

 origins of the various statutes against the selling of liquor which 

 are borne on the statute-books of a great many, indeed of most 

 of, our American States. These laws, when not copied verhatim or 

 adopted substantially from other States as the Kansas law was 

 copied from the Maine law have originated, not with a class of 

 citizens who asked for protection, but with a class who proposed 

 to protect some other class against its will. I fancy it would 

 be difficult to find a prohibitive liquor law which was not in the 

 first instance proposed by one who was himself either a teetotaler 

 by preference, or one without himself any taste for anything 

 stronger than water, and therefore without the slightest practical 

 experience of the evils of intoxication ; or by one whose knowledge 

 of the terrors of liquor-drinking came at second hand from the 

 description of the itinerant " temperance " orator ; or possibly by 

 witnessing the effects of the abuse of liquor upon some weaker- 

 minded brother. In other words, it was exactly as if all the per- 

 sons who preferred to go to bed at nine o'clock should revive the 

 old law of curfew and get it back upon the statute-books ; or, as 

 if all those who loved to go to Sunday school should legislate to 

 make it criminal not to go to Sunday school. So far as the records 

 go (and I consult only those published by the prohibitionists 

 themselves), not one single proposition for the policy of prohibit- 

 ing the sales of liquor has originated from a demand for protec- 

 tion, or from cause of necessity, or even of expediency ; or in a 

 locality where the evils of such sales were apparent or largely ex- 

 perienced, or indeed experienced at all. In a rural community, 

 however, absolutely without amusements, where personal liberty 

 resembles, as somebody has well said, " the desolate freedom of the 

 wild ass," and so becomes absolutely irksome where a man with 

 a theory or a crank with a hobby is welcome as a diversion it is 

 necessary to burrow in unusual paths for a relaxation. In such a 

 precinct as this, a proposition to forbid somebody something, to 

 prohibit something it might be the wearing of crinoline or of 

 birds in ladies' hats, or card playing, round dancing, Sunday news- 

 papers, or the eating of animal food anything, so long as it is 

 something any one enjoys will become fortuitously popular. 

 Any one of the above would furnish a topic for conversation, a 



