ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 585 



the author and supporter of many prohibitionist statutes. As 

 the standing chairman of a committee in the Legislature of a 

 certain State to report annually as to the value and the opera- 

 tion of these statutes, his reports are invariably enthusiastic as 

 to their great value, as to their effect in closing liquor stores, 

 and in making drunkenness almost unknown. And this in the 

 teeth of the facts, which everybody else admits, that these stat- 

 utes are stupendous failures, that they have multiplied the 

 number of liquor shops, and added to whatever harm they are 

 capable of by disguising them as " pharmacies," " groceries," or 

 other sorts of shops, and that they have enormously increased^ 

 almost squared, the number of inebriates reported before their 

 passage ! Nobody impeaches or dreams of impeaching the state- 

 ments of this dear old gentleman, nameless here for evermore, who, 

 foolish and fond and lovingly proud of his statutes, can see noth- 

 ing but utility and salvation in them ! But, all the same, it is an 

 actual wrong, and in time it will be surely an actual damage to 

 the Commonwealth that its intelligent citizens can so deliberately 

 misstate facts. If its best citizens can not tell the truth on public 

 matters, what can the Commonwealth expect of its masses ? 



But everybody knows that drunkenness is a curse, and if we 

 abolish all prohibitive liquor laws how shall the curse be removed ? 

 To enact a law compelling every man, woman, and child to drink 

 a pint of whisky or its equivalent in other spirits, or in vinous, 

 or malt liquors daily, might indeed do it. But such a law would 

 probably be impossible to propose in a legislative body cer- 

 tainly impossible to pass to a final reading. The question can 

 not probably be answered at present. Most things, however, 

 have their limit of value. And it might be a question whether 

 even the soul of a drunkard were worth saving at the expense of 

 the liberty, the morals, and the health of an entire community. 

 But something very near to an answer can, I think, be approxi- 

 mated. Let us enforce the common law we have, and make it 

 " common " indeed ; and forbear to pass statutes against which the 

 sense of justice of the enlightened community rebels, and which 

 can not be enforced, or whose enforcement is only, and can in the 

 nature of things be only, a sham. Let us wipe out forever from 

 every statute-book in America those prohibitive liquor laws 

 which an experience of sixty years has proved to be worse than 

 worthless, and even worse than useless, because they not only can 

 not be enforced, but enlarge, by stimulating, the alleged evils they 

 pretend to abolish! These laws emphatically have not lessened 

 the manufacture, sale, or consumption of liquor. There are not 

 to-day ten times as many people in the country as there were on 

 January 15, 1832. But, unless figures are as unreliable as the 

 temperance orators themselves, there are many hundred times as 



