ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 583 



the case of the drunkard and of the rumseller who will knowingly 

 naake his feeble or hereditarily weak fellow-man a drunkard. But 

 as there is no commandment in the decalogue, " Thou shalt not 

 sell liquor/' it is not in the unwritten law, and so can not justly, 

 equitably, or legally be put into written law. That it is ever put 

 there means some ulterior object, or if not an ulterior object al- 

 ways, certainly always it means, because it always has, an ulterior 

 effect. 



But prohibitory liquor laws have still another and ulterior ef- 

 fect, to wit : They beget an exaggerated oratory and an appetite 

 for sweeping statements which, by the cultivation of false statis- 

 tics, becomes absolute dishonesty, and so a burden upon and a re- 

 proach to public morals. For it is quite as heinous a sin, in the 

 court of conscience, to lie about the number of persons who have 

 died from using liquor as it is to lie about the amount of one's 

 collections for charity, as did Ananias, or about the value of one's 

 farm to the autumnal assessor. And yet another, more of an eco- 

 nomical than a moral consequence, perhaps, might be catalogued. 

 It has become in some communities practically impossible to dis- 

 cuss certain important questions. For example, it is to-day prac- 

 tically impossible in many quarters of this fair land to discuss so 

 important a question as the effect of alcoholic liquors upon the 

 human system. Impossible, I say, for no sooner is such a question 

 broached than the most tropical statements, backed by the glassy 

 fascination of enormous round numbers, would be hurled at the 

 general public until the modest man of science, and science itself, 

 are put to rout. This writer himself heard, in the Columbian 

 year and from a Columbian orator, the following masterpiece of 

 statement, to wit: "The champions of slavery, having declared 

 their purpose to shatter the Union, withdrew from Washington 

 and opened fire from without. Not so the liquor power. It plants 

 its cannon, charged with hell's dynamite (enough of them to 

 stretch in a line from this spot to the homes, the churches, the 

 schools of the people) ; and there, sheltered and protected by the 

 strong arm of the Government, the work of destruction goes 

 mightily on among Americans ; every five years there is an array 

 of dead as a consequence equal in number to those killed on both 

 sides in the civil war." By a coincidence, these words were ut- 

 tered at a time when the courts of the State of New York had 

 been several months, and at an expense of several hundred thou- 

 sand dollars' worth of high-priced expert testimony, trying to as- 

 certain whether Mrs. Carlyle Harris died of morphine poisoning, 

 and was beginning to make an equal outlay to find if Mrs. Dr. 

 Buchanan had died from the effect of morphine or atropine. 

 And yet, here and meanwhile, this glowing orator announced that 

 not one more nor one less than a million human beings had, in the 



