Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/809

Rh was framed. It proceeds upon the claim that any use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage is injurious to the user, a claim not yet proved, and certainly not yet by any means admitted, and that whatever is injurious to an individual, if it in any way affects the public injuriously, may be prevented, not by direct punishment of the offender, but indirectly by a sweeping prohibition forbidding all persons to furnish the means of committing the offense. If such law-making can be defended at all, it can be only as the making of police regulations, for which the frame of government of a federation of States seems a very curious place. Amendments or provisions of the Constitutions of the several States are equally objectionable on considerations of sound legislation. The great mistake made by temperance agitators who favor prohibition is that they expect too much from the mere passage of laws. They know that in our highly civilized, orderly, and law abiding communities there are laws for the punishment of all the grave offenses, such as murder, arson, burglary, and the like, and against almost innumerable misdemeanors and petty offenses; they see that offenses against such laws are not of frequent occurrence, and by hasty generalization, and usually without experience in the workings of the law, they draw the conclusion that the passage of a law making a certain act an offense and forbidding it has a potent effect in preventing it. In spite, however, of all the experiments that have been tried in legislating on the sale of intoxicating liquors, and varied and numerous statutes on the subject, the evil aimed at still exists. Hasty reasoning from this state of facts leads to the conclusion that it is not the law that is in fault, but the method of its enactment. Our prohibitionist friends know that there are no departures to a noticeable extent from the provisions of the Constitution of the United States and of the several States, and conclude that if they can get the enactment they desire into the Constitution it will have an effect that it can not have while only existing in the form of a statute. The real reason that there are violations of statutes and not of the provisions of Constitutions is that statutes and Constitutions deal with, and are intended to deal with, different kinds of law. The Constitution in general terms provides the frame of government for the State, distributes the legislative, judicial, and executive functions, and sets forth the powers of the Legislature, the courts, the Governor, and his associates; while statutes are enacted to fill in the details not covered by the Constitution, to erect and prescribe the powers of municipal, religious, charitable and other corporations, to regulate the relations of individuals to one another, the making of contracts, the settlement of estates, and the like, and to provide for the punishment of offenses against the community. A statute has the same force and effect while it exists that a provision of the Constitution has. It is easy to be understood that a constitutional provision for the punishment of murder would not be in the least more likely to prevent the commission of