438 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ance, and remorselessly exposes all tlieir transactions, the actual 

 result may be better in the long run than if State and private asso- 

 ciations proceeded independently of one another, often duplicating 

 each other's work, or, if not that, working at cross-purposes. 



EECE^s^T LEGISLATIOK AGAINST THE DKIJSTK EVIL. 



Bt APPLETON MOPwGAN. 



FIVE years ago it was sought in these pages * to discover the 

 cause or causes of the total failure in the United States of 

 prohibitive legislation. 



Our conclusion, so far as a conclusion could be said to have been 

 reached, was that the failure lay in the misapplication of ways to 

 means, rather than of means to ends — namely, that an attempt to 

 abolish the crime (or misdemeanor) of drunkenness by punishing, not 

 the criminal, but the community in which he committed the crime, 

 and to prevent law-breaking by legislating out of existence the neu- 

 tral instrument which happened to form the particular temptation to 

 the particular law-breaker (or with which he found it convenient to 

 commit the crime), was quite too logical to be practicable; as, for 

 instance, laws abolishing the use of spoons, as so many temptations 

 to housebreakers; or of railways, because trespassers on railway 

 tracks were often killed; or steamboats, because steamboat boilers 

 sometimes burst, would be quite too logical for public convenience. 

 Whence it followed that there was no demand for prohibitive liquor 

 laws, and therefore only failure had resulted from attempting to 

 enforce them. 



In the five years since that paper was printed almost every one 

 of the United States (in fact, all, with but one exception) have rec- 

 ognized such failure and striven to so recast each its statutes as 

 to plant the responsibility for breach of public order upon the real 

 offender without hardship to the law-abiding classes. The results 

 of these attempts have evolved many novel and unusual contriv- 

 ances and much curious operation of statutory and statistical wis- 

 dom, and some remarkable propositions — so much so that it is 

 believed that an effort to digest them (not by States, but by tlie prin- 

 ciples, or rather by the remedies, attempted) will be interesting con- 

 sideration for readers of the Popular Science Monthly. If the fol- 

 lowing summary shall develop two apparent paradoxes — first, that 

 the fewer the places where liquor is sold the larger the consumption 

 of liquor; and, second, that the larger the consumption of liquor the 

 less drunkenness — the present %vriter can only submit that these para- 



* The Popular Science Monthly for February, 1894. 



