LIQUOR LAWS NOT SUMPTUARY. 777 



"When its advocates assert that those who are determined to have 

 intoxicating beverages will get them, by hook and by crook, spite 

 of all safeguards with which the public weal surrounds itself (an as- 

 sertion equally strong against powder and dynamite laws, etc., and 

 equally weak), they almost say, but not quite, that those are least 

 prevented from buying who most need to be. This is quite true ; 

 but it is an inevitable incident, not of law, but of universal human 

 perversity. There is no help for it save by making men perfect at 

 once. In a prohibition State moderate drinkers will refrain from 

 buying, while abandoned drunkards will buy through the unman- 

 liest, the meanest, and basest expedients. So much the better for 

 the moderate drinkers, anyway and at least, and no worse for the 

 law. A multitude of such persons in Iowa and Kansas to-day 

 praise the laws that protect them from their lower selves. Even 

 our German fellow-citizens, with habits and prejudices brought 

 from " Fatherland," very numerously do the same. But this alone 

 is not the extent of public good secured. Hardened criminals of 

 any sort, whom no law can reach, would soon disappear from 

 natural causes were not their ranks replenished. The drunkards 

 who will lie and cheat, and generally degrade themselves for the 

 means to get drunk, in like manner would soon die out if not re- 

 formed. But they are replaced by new recruits from the moderate 

 drinkers alone; and if these largely respect prohibitory laws, 

 though the unhappy beings whom they are on the way to join do 

 not, there will ere long be few to break these laws at all. Unwit- 

 tingly, the assertion of liquor men that such laws are a "dead 

 letter," so far as it is true — and this is far less than is asserted — 

 only suggests another defense of these laws from their widely 

 experienced " social influence." 



One sometimes wonders why license laws, as well as prohibit- 

 ory ones, are not denounced as " sumptuary " ! The fact is, that 

 their natural tendency is to increase the expense of both intem- 

 perance and moderate drinking — the liquor-vender charging more 

 for what he sells to cover his expense for a license. This might 

 in some small measure lessen buying, and expense with it, on the 

 part of those who can least afford to buy. Would any one pretend 

 that this is the object of license laws, rather than to balance the 

 notorious injury done by the traffic to the State, by putting the 

 license fees into its treasury ? There is one obvious and nearer 

 reason for not misrepresenting license laws as "sumptuary," viz., 

 that however thoroughly enforced they may be, the means of 

 securing the effects of intoxicating drinks, moderate or immoder- 

 ate, are openly obtainable. Under prohibition, as well enforced, 

 they are not. 



It is to be noted that, if the Iowa Legislature had not provided 

 by further legislation against evasions of its statutes (through 



