582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion-breakers, for the law against selling lias become a law against 

 manufacturing, and so against purchasing. And all these laws 

 have been written in the Constitution of the State itself, and the 

 citizens go on buying, selling, and purchasing, with a pretense of 

 surreptitiousness that, comic as it all is, keeps buyer, seller, retailer, 

 and purchaser alike in breach of the statutes in scecula sc&cu- 

 lorum ! 



But, from whatever source or sources ingrafted upon a long- 

 suffering community, no honest student of these laws can deny 

 that they have had one of three effects, if not all three of them 

 namely, (1) to increase the demand for, while deteriorating 

 the quality of, the supply of liquors ; (2) to stimulate the inge- 

 nuity of the subject in evading the law itself, if not to produce 

 the appetite for liquor drinking where it existed not before ; or 

 (3) to give to the visionary or " crank " class in a community polit- 

 ical balance of power that is, an absolute even if a temporary 

 power. In other words, prohibitory liquor laws are dangerous 

 to the physical, moral, and political health of a community : to 

 the physical health, by inducing venders who can not afford to sell 

 pure liquor at the risk of the penalty, but who can not well resist 

 the temptation in view of the enormous profits of selling cheap 

 and vile mixtures at the enhanced prices for pure liquor, to keep 

 their poisons on sale ; to the moral health, by making honest men 

 law-breakers (with the dangerous tendency of the law-breaker in 

 petto toward law-breaking in extenso, which the writers of moral 

 poetry, from Dr. Watts up, have versified about until the memory 

 of man runneth not to the contrary) ; and to the political health, 

 by putting power into the hands of dangerous classes, the theo- 

 rists, the " cranks," and the people with " missions " and visions 

 as to reforming the world! (It might be added, perhaps, that 

 these laws offend the religious sense, for in some States, as in 

 Maine and in Kansas, the use of wine for the sacrament has been 

 held a violation of law. But this aspect we are not at present 

 discussing.) And all this in addition to the fact that prohibitory 

 liquor laws are, always and everywhere, an infringement of the 

 liberty of the subject, in opposition to the inalienable rights of 

 life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which it is the business 

 of constitutions to decree and of States to secure. 



Drunkenness is a crime in itself and the fruitful mother of 

 other crimes, and with it the criminal law should deal. But no 

 commercial law or municipal law, no form of civil (as distin- 

 guished from criminal) law has anything to do with crimes- 

 The legal maxim, as old as civilization, that one must so use his 

 own as not to injure his neighbor, takes ample care of the liquor- 

 seller who sells liquor to one who he knows will do violence or 

 wrong under its influence. Let the criminal law, then, attend to 



