RECENT LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL.
By APPLETON MORGAN.
Five years ago it was sought in these pages[1] to discover the cause or causes of the total failure in the United States of prohibitive legislation.
Our conclusion, so far as a conclusion could be said to have been reached, was that the failure lay in the misapplication of ways to means, rather than of means to ends—namely, that an attempt to abolish the crime (or misdemeanor) of drunkenness by punishing, not the criminal, but the community in which he committed the crime, and to prevent law-breaking by legislating out of existence the neutral instrument which happened to form the particular temptation to the particular law-breaker (or with which he found it convenient to commit the crime), was quite too logical to be practicable; as, for instance, laws abolishing the use of spoons, as so many temptations to housebreakers; or of railways, because trespassers on railway tracks were often killed; or steamboats, because steamboat boilers sometimes burst, would be quite too logical for public convenience. Whence it followed that there was no demand for prohibitive liquor laws, and therefore only failure had resulted from attempting to enforce them.
In the five years since that paper was printed almost every one of the United States (in fact, all, with but one exception) have recognized such failure and striven to so recast each its statutes as to plant the responsibility for breach of public order upon the real offender without hardship to the law-abiding classes. The results of these attempts have evolved many novel and unusual contrivances and much curious operation of statutory and statistical wisdom, and some remarkable propositions—so much so that it is believed that an effort to digest them (not by States, but by the principles, or rather by the remedies, attempted) will be interesting consideration for readers of the Popular Science Monthly. If the following summary shall develop two apparent paradoxes—first, that the fewer the places where liquor is sold the larger the consumption of liquor; and, second, that the larger the consumption of liquor the less drunkenness—the present writer can only submit that these paradoxes are not his own, but seem to arise from the official statistics submitted under the oaths of the authorities commissioned to collect them, as hereinafter will more fully appear:
Of the forty-nine States and Territories in the United States, the solitary exception above noted is the State of Maine. With a heroism that is actual martyrdom of self-interest and convenience, the State of Maine has clung with imperious tenacity to her policy of absolute prohibition, and to the logic of the report of her citizen, who, sixty-three years ago, carried her first prohibition law through her Legislature. Said that report: "The objection will doubtless be made that had we such a law it could not be enforced. Now, admit the validity of this objection, and it proves the utter hopelessness of the case; for no one, we presume, will venture the supposition that you can accomplish, against law, that which you could not effect with it."[2]
Admitting, as all the world does admit, that the abolition of drunkenness is desirable, against such pitiless, such iron, logic as this, there is no appeal, and from it there is no escape even to-day. But the trouble was, and is, that it is placing an entire Commonwealth in time of peace under martial law. It was in the fitness of things that General Appleton, a soldier, who had seen intoxication in a form most likely to impress him with dangers to the public—i. e., in soldiers to whom the safety of the State in time of war was intrusted—should have brought in the first prohibition law on record;[3] and that, in the teeth of more than two generations of failure, the sovereign State of Maine should have adhered to his martial logic, with the loss of her commerce and the reduction of her census, is a tribute to both the logic of a soldier or the self-insistence of the State which must compel admiration! In sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle. She has seen not only her contemporary sister States, but those admitted yesterday and the day before, pass her in affluence and prosperity. But the only remedy for her failure she will listen to the suggestion of is an increased severity of prohibition statutes and an increased crucifixion of her law-abiding citizens, lest one of her own or a single stranger within her gates should obtain a glass of alcoholic compound within her borders.
But, cling as the State of Maine may to the fierce logic of prohibition, it appears that her forty-eight sisters have found its unappealable rigor too rigid, and have modulated it in the diverse ways now to be considered.