ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 581 



Maine, the policy of prohibiting that which did not exist, of pro- 

 tecting the few from temptations which had no attractions to the 

 many, flew on the wings of oratory and became fixed by the edicts 

 of legislation. Into the older community, Essex County, it may 

 be feared that Satan has entered ! But the sovereign citizen of 

 the State of Maine still lives on, in comic slavery to its prohibitory 

 liquor law a law indeed marvelous to behold, and a sight for the 

 nations of the earth ; alternately sending its citizens to jail for 

 being free men, and rewarding them for becoming slaves ! Under 

 the malign influences of the Essex reform the State of Maine 

 has introduced into its economy a new industry, that of the 

 " smeller." Its extraordinary courts and constables and special 

 magistrates, its bailiffs and petty officers who earn salaries on the 

 pretense of enforcing laws which none of themselves, and prob- 

 ably no officers of the State or of its courts, from chief justice 

 to tipstaff, thinks of observing, are legion. Of the published 

 volumes of its reports the bulk are ponderous decisions on and ex- 

 pounding of its peculiar blue laws, which read between the lines 

 like statutes of the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein! And for all 

 this the intelligent citizens of Maine pay the bills and dodge the 

 laws as well as they can ! Sixty years or so ago, when the Essex 

 law crawled into Maine, surely, as I have said, it was a virtuous 

 and an Arcadian State. At present, whether it is more temperate 

 than any of its sister States, whether there is less immorality, 

 drunkenness, and crime therein than in any other State in the 

 Union, the citizens of Maine are not fond of expressing an opinion, 

 and doubtless the less said the better ! It is. to be added, more- 

 over, that the Essex County letter-writers who thus builded 

 better, or worse, than they knew, did not themselves propose a 

 total prohibition from the sale of wines, ales, and other vinous or 

 malt liquor, but one solely from the sale of ardent spirits, and of 

 this only a mild restriction (a sort of " jug law ") that is, that 

 spirits should be sold only to prevent the public drinking in rum- 

 shops and bar-rooms, and the public spectacle of intoxication and 

 brawling which so often resulted (and that what they sought is 

 desirable to-day, as desirable as then, nobody can deny). But the 

 idea that a gentleman who desired to use ardent spirits could not 

 first purchase them, it is simple justice to the writers of the let- 

 ters to say, did not present itself to them at all. When the mat- 

 ter got into the Maine Legislature, however, whether because the 

 distinction between wines and liquors was too subtle or from other 

 causes, that distinction disappeared. As the pure and simple 

 prohibition of the sale of any liquor, even of domestic manufac- 

 tured cider, it became a law ; the prohibition has since been writ- 

 ten into the Constitution of Maine itself, until that State has be- 

 come a Commonwealth of law-breakers not only but of constitu- 



