Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/812

792 But I am not prepared to admit that all the intoxicating liquor used as a beverage, or even the greater part, becomes by such use injurious to the public, so as to give it a right to interfere by prohibiting its sale, so long as any other method can be found to relieve the public from the burdens which we undertake under our system of caring for our fellows when they are unable to take care of themselves.

I am not aware that any one has ever claimed for the public a right to prohibit an individual from doing anything that does not interfere with the rights of others. If the public has no such right, it is hard to see how drunkenness becomes punishable by law unless the drunken person offensively exhibits his drunkenness. I am not aware that any one has ever claimed that the act of drinking a glass of wine or of lager-beer is morally wrong, nor that any one has ever proposed to forbid it by law. If, as is said, the use of alcoholic tonics to a certain extent is beneficial to certain persons, then there is certainly not only nothing wrong in such use, but the contrary is true. And again, if there is nothing in the use of alcoholic drinks which the public has a right to forbid, it is hard to see how it acquires a right to interfere with their sale on moral grounds alone. In a recent article in the "North American Review" Neal Dow quotes with approval certain things said by a friend of his in a conversation had with James Stuart Mill, in which his friend admits that the public have no right to interfere with what a man may eat or drink, and then claims that it has a right to do indirectly what it has no right to do directly, and gives illustrations of restrictions similar to those imposed on the traffic in intoxicating liquor. These illustrations are taken up by Dio Lewis in the latter portion of the same article and disposed of, by showing that the other restrictions depend for their justification upon grounds not set up in the case of the liquor-traffic.

Are we, then, to have an unrestricted sale, and is there no middle ground between that and prohibition, save license? Must we admit on grounds of morality that if we can not prohibit we must keep our skirts clean by refusing to regulate? The views put forward in the remainder of this article are advanced with diffidence because they are believed to be both original and new, and are a wide departure from any method which has been publicly proposed for the mitigation or removal of the evils of intemperance. The principle of high license, and, in a different relationship, that involved in the civil-damage laws, come nearer to them than anything heretofore suggested.

The quarrel that the public have with the liquor-seller is not that he furnishes the liquor-buyer with the means of injuring himself or the community. If it were, the public would have the same quarrel with the hardware-dealer who sells an axe to one who may cut himself or commit a murder with it, and with the grocer who sells matches to one who may use them to set fire to a public building. Its quarrel with the liquor-seller is that he furnishes to the liquor-buyer the means