58o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



call for a conference in the meeting house after singing school, 

 might appear in the choice of a selectman, or in the election for 

 the Assembly member, and so speedily become "practical poli- 

 tics,^' especially in a State where a Governor is chosen every year, 

 and so which lives in a state of perpetual gubernatorial canvass ! 

 If laws preventing the sale of liquors should be demanded in a 

 petition of those who used and habitually purchased liquor, but 

 who desired to be relieved from the temptation of purchasing it, 

 a wise public policy might have decreed that the petition prevail. 

 Or, if the best sense of the most enlightened citizens of a com- 

 munity (and it is usually its most enlightened citizens who best 

 appreciate the value and understand the judicious use of liquor) 

 had felt the need of a law prohibiting the sale of cheap and 

 poisonous adulterations of liquor to those who were unable to 

 buy the pure article and whose healths were being deteriorated 

 thereby in any one of these cases these laws might have wisely 

 been forthcoming, under a general pursuit of the greatest good 

 for the greatest number. But for the non-users and non-pur- 

 chasers of liquor, finding themselves in a majority, to resolve on 

 their own motion that the minority of their fellow-citizens needed 

 a protection, for which they had not asked, from temptations 

 against which they had not protested, but which were not temp- 

 tations to the majority, savors rather more of what old Butler 

 characterized as " compounding sins one had a mind to by damn- 

 ing those ones not inclined to," than of legislation for the greatest 

 good of the greatest number ; of paternal rather than of popular 

 government ! 



Once originated, however, the history of the paternal prohib- 

 itive liquor law is invariable namely, its appearance in local 

 politics, then in State politics, and so on, up to the dignity of a 

 balance of power, where the numerical insignificance of the sup- 

 porters became a tower of strength, and the supporters themselves 

 grew to have fat things at their disposal. The earliest liquor 

 law I can find, for example, grew out of some letters begin- 

 ning on February 15, 1832, in a local newspaper* in Essex 

 County, Massachusetts ; certainly at that time one of the soberest, 

 most law-abiding and church-going communities in the world ; 

 whence it was carried by one of the letter-writers, who became a 

 member of the Maine Legislature, into that learned and economic 

 body. If there was a State in our Union of States, at that date 

 almost Arcadian in its innocence, where the foot of the tempter 

 and the setter of snares, or the sybarite, or the debauchee were 

 unknown, that State was Maine ! And yet from the immaculate 

 vicinage of Essex County, Massachusetts, to the virtuous State of 



* The Salem Gazette. 



