592 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



when another keg of root beer was charged to them, and so on ! 

 This, of course, is only one of hundreds of such devices, which 

 are the rule and not the exception in the liquor-prohibiting States. 

 And I beg to ask, what respect a State can expect its citizens to 

 have for its laws, or for themselves, when forced to habitually re- 

 sort to a deceit which deceives nobody, in order to live as they 

 see fit and as they have an inalienable right to live ? 



Liquor has always properly been, and always properly will be, 

 a subject of revenue, or, as it is called, excise, and this excise is 

 most conveniently levied in the shape of licenses. Of licenses, 

 high and low, high license is doubtless the best for all concerned, 

 as providing cleaner and more sumptuously appointed drinking 

 places, with that modulation and betterment of manners and of 

 speech to which elegance of surroundings will always conduce. 

 But prohibitive liquor laws should be discontinued, because sixty 

 years of certainly faithful trial have shown them to be failures, 

 dangerous to the public peace, the public health, and the public 

 morals ; against public policy as tending to bring all reasonable 

 laws into bad repute, and against absolute right as an interfer- 

 ence of the law merchant with the jurisdiction of the criminal 

 law ; enacted, as criminal laws are enacted, by those who are not 

 supposed to come under their operation. 



Much of what has been said of prohibitory liquor laws in this 

 paper might also be said of the usury laws,* which are of the 

 family of crime-creating statutes, which are always readily evaded 

 and which interfere with the market value of the commodity 

 protected. But there is this difference, that usury laws are de- 

 manded by the protected class, while prohibitive liquor laws are 

 not, and never can be. 



Admitting freely all that can be said about the horrors which 

 liquor can work, sociologists as well as Samaritans know that no 

 public evil can be dealt with abstractly dragged up by the roots 

 and exterminated in a single swoop of virtue. Sinful as the 

 liquor industry may be, its absolute and sudden annihilation 

 would throw millions out of employment, and put starvation into 

 the room of competence in countless homes, to remain until, by 

 the slow labor of economists and publicists, capital and labor had 

 readjusted themselves to the new condition. And the literal in- 

 terpretation of statutes at present upon the statute-books of cer- 

 tain American States would send fathers of families to State 

 prisons to serve out terms of sixty or a hundred years under 

 cumulative sentences which more than cover the natural lives of 

 men. Fortunately, however, the drinking of liquor does not de- 



* In Queen Elizabeth's time the analogy was still more perfect, for the price of liquor 

 was regulated as the price of money now is sought to be by usury laws by statute. 



