588 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nog, for those sturdy and starving patriots ! But this worthy lady- 

 lived in rural New England, and had been taught from her youth 

 of the terrors and misery that lay hidden not for fools only, but 

 for everybody in a bottle ! And she could not see that God's 

 gifts to men sometimes have come to his perishing creatures in 

 the liquor form. The public inconvenience of this belief is not 

 inconsiderable. Not only are its citizens deprived of the sanitary 

 potency of liquor in emergencies (for I have heard apparently 

 sane persons, in a village not a thousand miles from the city of 

 New York, declare that they would rather die than have their 

 lives saved by a glass of liquor), but the youths are taught, not 

 to be virtuous and sober, and to shun drunkenness, but to perse- 

 cute liquor sellers and to waste liquor by emptying it into the 

 gutters : that the unfortunate who drinks himself into imbecility, 

 or into becoming a public nuisance, is not a criminal or a law- 

 breaker, but an example of the wickedness of the hotel keeper 

 and so not the sinner but the sinned against ! Not he to be dis- 

 ciplined or chided, but the innocent liquor is to be cursed, and 

 the liquor dealer to be deprived of his property ! It would appear 

 to most of us that to preach a little less about the holy horror of 

 rum, and a little more about the political obligation of the citizen 

 to keep himself from drunkenness to notify him that the law 

 locks up the wretched drunkard, not because he is not a citizen 

 who can not drink if he please, and not because liquor is a sinful 

 thing, or because his neighbor has no right to invest his capital/ 

 if so pleased, in hogsheads of liquor and to retail it by the glass 

 or spoonful, but because he is drunk, and because a drunkard is 

 a nuisance and a threat to the community would be an experi- 

 ment worth the trying. Another experiment would be to rely 

 upon such an administration of what laws we have as will en- 

 courage temperance by punishing the drunkard, not the liquor 

 which he drinks or the manufacturer or the seller of it, nor yet 

 the community whose misfortune and for .whose sins it is that the 

 drunkard is a part of it. We can not reclaim our wayward youth 

 by sending their parents to Sunday school; we can not rid the 

 community of drunkards by refusing to sell liquor to the sober 

 man. But it requires no statute to refuse to sell it to the debau- 

 chee. This land of ours is ruled by law. The trend of progress 

 is toward a larger and a more enlightened, not a lesser and more 

 ignorant liberty; and civilizations move not backward. In the 

 calm eye of the law, the owner of pipes of liquor is as much 

 entitled to his own as is the owner of a " temperance " newspaper, 

 as long as he injures not his neighbor. He of the wine pipes must 

 not sell to the habitual drunkard, or to the hereditary victim of 

 alcoholism who works damage in his cups; neither shall he of 

 the printing press libel in words him of the wine pipes, or invite 



