5 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



many liquor stores and shops for the public drinking of liquor in 

 our fair land as there were upon that date. Various causes have 

 doubtless operated to produce this enormous increase. But one 

 cause which may have done its contributive share toward the 

 result, perhaps, is that, under rigid statutes, any moral obligation 

 not to use liquor which may have existed on January 15, 1832, has 

 become a sort of moral obligation to use it as a sort of Declaration 

 of Independence of laws which interfere with the personal liberty 

 of the subject ; which exist not by consent of those whom those 

 laws govern, but by the consent of those whom they do not gov- 

 ern, and who never come within their operation ; whose prosecu- 

 tion, since it can only be achieved by recourse to the services of 

 the spy, the informer, and the " smeller," is persecution, and tends 

 to bring all law into contempt and into public disgust. 



That these laws do exist by reason of the judgments of appel- 

 late courts (even the Supreme Court of the United States having 

 affirmed their " constitutionality ") is not to militate against their 

 injustice or their inconvenience. Those decisions are not as to the 

 expediency, but only as to the technicality, of these statutes ; all 

 that those decisions amount to is that as between the individual 

 the citizen in their breach, and the State, the State has a right 

 to enact the law under its special (State) Constitution, and that 

 the question of internal traffic so long as it is not interstate traf- 

 fic is not one with which the Federal jurisdiction concerns itself. 

 Legally a State has a right to do what it will within its own 

 boundaries, so long as it does not interfere with the rights of its 

 neighboring States or violate the Federal Constitution. And 

 however absurd its local statutes may be, once legally enacted 

 they must be reviewed at the polls, not in the Federal courts. 

 But there is a question beyond the polls. 



Laws are for the greatest good of the greatest number, at 

 least in republics, where the paternal jurisdiction of States is 

 not invited and will not be tolerated. Granting everything that 

 can be said as to the bad effect of liquor itself, every logician 

 will admit that if it can be proved that in a single instance 

 or class of instances the effect of liquor is salutary, that it 

 cures as well as kills (as, for example, in a case of partial 

 drowning or of rattlesnake bite), then to prevent its sale is not 

 only illogical but oppressive. A law can not be judged as be- 

 nign or harmful accordingly as it is negatively inoffensive. If 

 in a single instance it refuses to save life, then it has ceased to 

 operate benignly and has commenced to operate fatally. No law 

 can exist without a reason for its existence, and when the reason 

 for it fails the law disappears. But when a law operates not only 

 unreasonably but fatally, there should not be much hesitation as 

 to its doom. It is illegal. And this is another case where liquor 



