Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/50

40 indignant at being treated in so outrageous a manner, and utters his protest in no measured language; his conduct only serves to convince his captors that the charge based upon the odor of alcohol is well founded, and he is mulcted in forty or sixty dollars, or sent to the workhouse for ninety days, as the case may be. No one is safe under such a law; it is often a very difficult matter to determine whether a person is drunk or sober, and frequently it is impossible even by the most minute examination. Again, some people become intoxicated from a single glass of champagne, while others will drink two or more bottles with impunity. It is manifestly unjust to allow an individual peculiarity like this to establish the guilt or innocence of an accused person.

As I have said, why stop at making drunkenness a crime when there are other vices far more immoral and more destructive to the character of the perpetrator? Why not enact a law against lying? There are laws against slander, which injures the one against whom it is directed, and they are well enough, for to injure another is a crime. But lying in the abstract remains unnoticed by the penal statutes, though a more degrading vice in the eyes of all civilized mankind than mere drunkenness.

On the first of June of the year 1889 a statute went into effect in the State of New York which prohibits, under severe penalties, the selling of cigarettes to minors under the age of sixteen; and the State of Michigan has recently not only enacted a similar law, but goes farther, and interdicts the manufacture of cigarettes within the limits of the State. Is it to be supposed for one moment that minors under the age of sixteen in either State smoke fewer cigarettes than they did before these laws were passed? How is the vender to know in many cases whether the applicant for cigarettes is over sixteen or not? And is there any difficulty for any minor to get a companion who is undoubtedly over sixteen, or some one else, to buy cigarettes for him? Legislatures that pass such laws, and governors that sign them, are apparently ignorant of the first principles of jurisprudence. I venture to say that even now, although not two weeks have elapsed since the act went into effect, it is practically a dead letter in the city of New York and throughout the State generally, and I am quite sure that not a single conviction will ever be obtained under its provisions. I am not certain that our society did its full duty in not protesting against the statute-books being encumbered with such rubbish. Cigarette-smoking by minors is an evil to be suppressed by proper instruction and by the intervention of parents and guardians. If these latter can not prevent it, it is quite certain that all the policemen in the State, backed by all the majesty of this particular law, will have their labor for their pains.