LEGISLATION AGAINST THE BRINK EVIL. 439 



doxes are not liis own, but seem to arise from the official statistics sub- 

 mitted under the oaths of the authorities commissioned to collect 

 them, as hereinafter will more fully appear: 



Of the forty-nine States and Territories in the United States, the 

 solitary exception above noted is the State of Maine. With a hero- 

 ism that is actual martydom of self-interest and convenience, 

 the State of Maine has clung with imperious tenacity to her policy 

 of absolute prohibition, and to the logic of the report of her citi- 

 zen, who, sixty-three years ago, carried her first prohibition law 

 through her Legislature. Said that report: "The objection will 

 doubtless be made that had we such a law it could not be enforced. 

 Now, admit the validity of this objection, and it proves the utter 

 hopelessness of the case; for no one, we presume, will venture the 

 supposition that you can accomplish, against law, that which you 

 could not effect with it." * 



Admitting, as all the world does admit, that the abolition of 

 drunkenness is desirable, against such pitiless, such iron, logic as this, 

 there is no appeal, and from it there is no escape even to-day. But 

 the trouble was, and is, that it is placing an entire Commonwealth 

 in time of peace under martial law. It was in the fitness of things 

 that General Appleton, a soldier, who had seen intoxication in a 

 form most likely to impress him with dangers to the public — i. e., in 

 soldiers to whom the safety of the State in time of war was in- 

 trusted — should have brought in the first prohibition law on record ;f 

 and that, in the teeth of more than two generations of failure, the 

 sovereign State of Maine should have adhered to his martial logic, 

 with the loss of her commerce and the reduction of her census, is 

 a tribute to both the logic of a soldier or the self-insistence of the 

 State which must compel admiration! In sixty -three years Maine 

 has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle. She 

 has seen not only her contemporary sister States, but those admitted 

 yesterday and the day before, pass her in affluence and prosperity. 

 But the only remedy for her failure she will listen to the suggestion 

 of is an inreased severity of prohibition statutes and an increased 

 crucifixion of her law-abiding citizens, lest one of her own or a 

 single stranger within her gates should obtain a glass of alcoholic 

 compound within her borders. 



But, cling as the State of Maine may to the fierce logic of pro- 

 hibition, it appears that her forty-eight sisters have found its unap- 

 pealable rigor too rigid, and have modulated it in the divers ways now 

 to be considered. 



* Report of General James Appleton to the Legislature of Maine, July 15, 1837. 

 I General Appleton was commander of the First Brigade of the Second Division of 

 Massachusetts iafantry in the War of 1812-1815, his resignation dating 1828. 



