ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 587 



laws are dangerous to the community namely, they might pre- 

 vent the purchase of enough liquor to save a human life. As it 

 is, there are rural communities, not a thousand miles from the 

 metropolis of New England, where the apothecary will refuse 

 (and in my own experience has refused) to sell the mother of a 

 sick child enough alcohol to light a spirit lamp to warm the little 

 sufferer's sustenance on a summer night at a strange hotel, where 

 no other artificial heat could be procured ! This same apothecary 

 could sell Paris green by the pound for the destruction of alleged 

 potato bugs, or morphine, or arsenic, or any other poison on pres- 

 entation of a scrap of paper beginning with an " IjL ," and signed 

 by any scrawl which the writer might choose to affix, and call it 

 the signature of a physician. Our apothecary that night was 

 illogical and dangerous to the community, not by instinct or by 

 choice, but by the virtue of the laws of his State by the laws, as 

 it happened in the case I have in mind, of the noble old Common- 

 wealth of Massachusetts ! 



But we have not closed the catalogue yet; there is still an- 

 other, and this by no means a slight, evil, which is caused to the 

 community by prohibitive liquor laws, which might be called, 

 perhaps, the intellectual evil which they work. This is the 

 begetting of the very general horror of wines, spirits, malt 

 liquors, and other drinkables of more or less vinous character, 

 which is allowed to prevail, not only, but is sedulously and per- 

 petually cultivated in certain communities, until very young 

 people are apt to consider themselves as virtuous paragons sur- 

 rounded by alcoholic demons seeking their destruction, whose 

 fault, and not their own, it will be if they tumble. This idea and 

 sentiment are enormously prevalent, thanks to those industrious 

 people the " temperance " reformers (though they insult one of 

 the cardinal virtues by so calling themselves). I can indeed in- 

 stance no severer proof of it than to narrate that, having been so 

 fortunate, in the case of some special investigation then on hand, 

 as to unearth the diary kept by an officer of the Revolution dur- 

 ing the march of Arnold's and Wooster's commands through the 

 snows of the terrible winter of 1775-76 to relieve the army in 

 Canada, and the subsequent retreat in rags, hunger, freezing, and 

 wretchedness, I intrusted its copying to a worthy lady, a de- 

 scendant of the officer who kept the diary. In due time she 

 returned the copy, but wrote me, " I have omitted all references 

 to brandy and eggnog, as not part of our country's history." And 

 yet to me, and I fancy most of us, it was " history "ay, and the 

 " history of our country " too ! How those patriots lived through 

 and managed to survive at all the terrors of that winter, certainly 

 was history ; and I for one am thankful that, at least, if there 

 was no food betimes, there were brandy, and an occasional egg- 



