792 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



But I am not prepared to admit that all the intoxicating liquor used 

 as a beverage, or even the greater part, becomes by such use injurious 

 to the public, so as to give it a right to interfere by prohibiting its 

 sale, so long as any other method can be found to relieve the public 

 from the burdens which we undertake under our system of caring for 

 our fellows when they are unable to take care of themselves. 



I am not aware that any one has ever claimed for the public a right 

 to prohibit an individual from doing anything that does not interfere 

 with the rights of others. If the public has no such right, it is hard 

 to see how drunkenness becomes punishable by law unless the drunken 

 person offensively exhibits his drunkenness. I am not aware that any 

 one has ever claimed that the act of drinking a glass of wine or of 

 lager-beer is morally wrong, nor that any one has ever proposed to 

 forbid it by law. If, as is said, the use of alcoholic tonics to a certain 

 extent is beneficial to certain persons, then there is certainly not only 

 nothing wrong in such use, but the contrary is true. And again, if 

 there is nothing in the use of alcoholic drinks which the public has a 

 right to forbid, it is hard to see how it acquires a right to interfere 

 with their sale on moral grounds alone. In a recent article in the 

 " North American Review " Neal Dow quotes with approval certain 

 things said by a friend of his in a conversation had with James Stuart 

 Mill, in which his friend admits that the public have no right to inter- 

 fere with what a man may eat or drink, and then claims that it has a 

 right to do indirectly what it has no right to do directly, and gives 

 illustrations of restrictions similar to those imposed on the traffic in 

 intoxicating liquor. These illustrations are taken up by Dio Lewis in 

 the latter portion of the same article and disposed of, by showing that 

 the other restrictions depend for their justification upon grounds not 

 set up in the case of the liquor-traffic. 



Are we, then, to have an unrestricted sale, and is there no middle 

 ground between that and prohibition, save license ? Must we admit 

 on grounds of morality that if we can not prohibit we must keep our 

 skirts clean by refusing to regulate ? The views put forward in the 

 remainder of this article are advanced with diffidence because they are 

 believed to be both original and new, and are a wide departure from 

 any method which has been publicly proposed for the mitigation or 

 removal of the evils of intemperance. The principle of high license, 

 and, in a different relationship, that involved in the civil-damage laws, 

 come nearer to them than anything heretofore suggested. 



The quarrel that the public have with the liquor-seller is not that 

 he furnishes the liquor-buyer with the means of injuring himself or 

 the community. If it were, the public would have the same quarrel 

 with the hardware-dealer who sells an axe to one who may cut him- 

 self or commit a murder with it, and with the grocer who sells matches 

 to one who may use them to set fire to a public building. Its quarrel 

 with the liquor seller is that he furnishes to the liquor-buyer the means 



