"3. That the public sale of intoxicating drinks should be prohibited, and that this prohibition should be obtained by leaving it to a vote of the people.
"By the first principle, the continual improvement of the land was secured. Employment was furnished to laborers at remunerative prices. The value of the land was increased by the mutual effort of the colonists. The value of my land was also enhanced, and it was made more and more marketable.
"By the second principle, a vast and constant expense was saved—greater than the cost and annual interest upon all the railroads of the United States. Stock was improved, the cultivation of root crops was encouraged, and the economizing of fertilizers.
"By the third principle, the money, the health, and the industry of the people were conserved, that they might all be devoted to the work before them.
"I am in candor compelled to say that I did not introduce the local-option principle into Vineland from any motives of philanthropy. I am not a temperance man in the total-abstinence sense. I introduced the principle because in cool, abstract thought I conceived it to be of vital importance to the success of my colony. If in this thought I had seen that liquor made men more industrious, more skillful, more economical, and more aesthetic in their tastes, I certainly should then have made liquor-selling one of the main principles of my project."
* * * * *
"The question then came up as to how I could give such direction to public opinion as would regulate this difficulty. Many persons had the idea that no place could prosper without taverns—that to attract business and strangers taverns were necessary. I could not accomplish my object by the influence of total-abstinence men, as they were too few in numbers in proportion to the whole community. I had long perceived that there was no such thing as reaching the result by the moral influence brought to bear on single individuals—that to benefit an entire community, the law or regulation would have to extend to the entire community. In examining the evil, I found also that the moderate use of liquor was not the difficulty to contend against, but it was the immoderate use of it.
"The question, then, was to bring the reform to bear upon what led to the immoderate use of it. I found that few or none ever became intoxicated in their own families, in the presence of their wives and children, but that the drunkards were made in the taverns and saloons. After this conclusion was reached, the way appeared clear. It was not necessary to make a temperance man of each individual—it was not necessary to abridge the right or privilege that people might desire to have of keeping liquor in their own houses, but to get their consent to prevent the public sale of it by the small—that people in bartering would not be subject to the custom of drinking—that they would not have the opportunity of drinking in bar-rooms, away from all home restraint or influence; in short, I believed that if the public sale of liquor was stopped either in taverns or beer saloons, the knife would reach the root of the evil. The next thing to do was to deal with settlers personally as they bought land, and to counsel with them as to the best thing to be done. In conversation with them I never treated it as a moral question—I explained to them that I was not a total-abstinence man myself, but that on account of the liability of liquor to abuse when placed in seductive forms at every street corner, and as is the usual custom that followed our barbarous law that it incited to crime, and made men unfortunate who would otherwise succeed; that most of the settlers had little money to begin with, sums varying from two hundred to one thousand dollars, which, if added to a man's labor, would be enough in many cases to obtain him a home, but which taken to the tavern would melt away like snow before a spring sun; that new places were liable to have this abuse to a more terrible extent than old places, as men were removed from the restraints of old associations, and in the midst of the excitement of forming new acquaintances; and that it was a notorious fact that liquor-drinking did not add to the inclination for physical labor. I then asked them—for the sake of their sons, brothers, friends—to help establish the new system, as I believed it to be the foundation-stone of our future prosperity.
"To these self-evident facts they would almost all accede. Many of them had witnessed the result of liquor-selling in the new settlements of the Far West, and were anxious to escape from it. The Local-Option Law of Vineland was not established, therefore, by temperance men or total-abstinence men only, but by the citizens generally, upon broad social and public principles. It has since been maintained in the same way. Probably not one tenth of the number of voters in Vineland are what may be called total-abstinence men. I explain this point to show that this reform was not the result of mere fanaticism, but the sense of the people generally, and that the people who succeed under it are such people as almost all communities are composed of. This law has been practically in operation since the beginning of the settlement in the autumn of 1861, though the act of the Legislature empowering the people of Landis Township to vote upon license or no license was not passed until 1863. The vote has always stood against license by overwhelming majorities, there being generally only from two to nine votes in favor of liquor-selling. The population of the Vineland tract is about ten thousand five hundred people, consisting of manufacturers and business people upon the town plot in the centre, and, around this centre, of farmers and fruit-growers. The most of the tract is in Landis Township. I will now give statistics of police and poor expenses of this township for the past six years: