ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 593 



stroy either the body or the soul. The hest evidence obtainable 

 by medical industry intimates that, while, as everybody knows, 

 the temperate outlive all other classes, even the habitually intoxi- 

 cated man may, and does, outlive the rigid and inexorable total 

 abstainer who refuses to his organism the stimulant which over- 

 worked or overstrung human systems sometimes insist upon.* 



I do not know what evidence can be subpoenaed as to the loss 

 of souls. But, admitting the occasional loss of a soul, the question 

 might arise as to whether a soul could not be saved at too high a 

 price. Should an entire community like the State of Vermont, or 

 of Maine, or of Kansas, or like Boston, or the city of New York, 

 for example, imperil its sanitary existence to save any one given 

 human soul ? Or how large or how small a community should 

 be allotted to peril per soul ? It requires a strong stomach and a 

 tranquil nervous system to absorb ice water, and dyspeptics and 

 excitable persons are not always deserving of death at the hands 

 of the State. 



I know that the easy-going humanitarian answer to this is, 

 that all prohibitive liquor policies carry within themselves the 

 seeds of their own dissolution, since they are only agitated in 

 sparsely settled localities, from which, as populations thicken 

 there, they gently disappear. f But, meantime, if the traffic in 

 liquor is dangerous, these policies are working an enormous harm 

 to the communities where they are tolerated. All history proves 

 that there is no institution or system in the world which it has 

 ever been attempted to stifle by legislation which is not to-day as 

 fixed and immutable as the hills. The efforts of the English 

 Puritans to abolish the theater made theatrical performances 

 parcel of English civilization. The attempts of the middle ages, 

 the Inquisition, and the Index, to destroy the printing press made 

 the printing press a necessity of life everywhere. If liquor is 

 dangerous to the United States of America, philanthropists and 

 patriots should be careful how they pass laws against it ! 



* I believe the figures are claimed to be as follows : Out of 4,234 cases of mortality 

 from ordinary causes, the lengths of life were : 



Temperate livers 62-13 years. 



Careless drinkers 59'67 



Free drinkers 57-59 " 



Habitually intemperate 52-03 



Total abstainers 51-22 " 



According to a recent report of the British Medical Association, in their journal in the 

 year 1891. 



f The little town of Westfield, N. J., has two or three active prohibition societies, and I 

 am told that all the churches (except the Roman Catholic and the Episcopal) preach pro- 

 hibition from their pulpits. Ten years ago, with a population of two thousand, the town 

 cast three hundred prohibition votes ; last year, with a population of thirty-seven hundred, 

 as I am informed, it cast just fourtsf n ! 

 VOL. XLIV. 45 



