ABOLISH ALL PROHIBITIVE LIQUOR LAWS. 589 



his fellow-citizens to violence against him or destruction of his 

 worldly goods. For over one and all is the law of the land. Let 

 our youth learn this, and not that others have obligations and 

 stand at their peril, while he alone is free, if he only will sign a 

 pledge and wear a blue ribbon ! 



In still another way the prohibitive liquor laws have worked, 

 and are still working, hardship to our people. The liquor-drink- 

 ing habit in large and metropolitan cities is palpably on the de- 

 cline. Here the ever-increasing complexity of affairs, the im- 

 mense demand of competition, the necessity of care and vigilance 

 lest one be outrun in the race for success, and the strain of busi- 

 ness methods, render it injudicious to drink much wine or liquor ; 

 large corporations exact a rigid temperance, often total absti- 

 nence, from their officials and employees. Either because edicts 

 of fashion for once have followed the demands of business, or for 

 some other cause it appears to be absolutely no longer fashionable 

 in cities to drink deep or long at table. In the natural course 

 there is reason to believe that this fashion might reach the inte- 

 rior, to prevail there. But, in the towns and cities of the liquor- 

 law-ridden States, the more stringent the ordinances, and the 

 more important and bustling the " smeller/' it more and more be- 

 comes a point of self-respect, almost of honor, between man and 

 man, to drink much and often, and liquor drinking increases 

 daily. Even lads of tender years, clubbing together, buying a 

 demijohn of what purports to be something of which they have 

 heard their elders speak, and hiding in some cellar or bedroom, 

 experience all the fearful joys of dissipation ! In other interior 

 precincts where there never was much liquor drinking, but where 

 the itinerant reformer stands in lieu of lyceum or theater or as- 

 sembly, the liquor habit will remain about the same, not increas- 

 ing, but not allowed by the reformers to die out and their occu- 

 pation be gone. So the maxim of Horace Greeley, that a habit- 

 ual drunkard is quite as useful a member of society as a tem- 

 perance reformer, remains unerringly true, not only, but he is 

 positively a retarder of public progress. But once let every 

 liquor law be expunged from the statute-books of our American 

 States and the temperance reformer would disappear, the benign 

 influences of the city would spread to the country, liquor drink- 

 ing being no longer a matter of courtesy or self-respect, but an 

 indifferent matter of taste, would decrease, as it always has de- 

 creased in the civilized communities when let alone and to itself. 

 The horror of liquor would disappear, and only the horror of the 

 drunkard would remain. And the enormous gain would not only 

 be the salvage of the money wasted in pretending to enforce in- 

 competent and disrespected laws, but in behalf of public morality, 

 because with no sumptuary laws to break, there would be no 



