Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/788

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HE recent article of William A. Hammond, M. D., on Sumptuary Laws and their Social Influence consists of two parts—

(1) an attempt to confound laws prohibiting the common sale of alcoholic beverages with obsolete "sumptuary" legislation, and (2) certain criticisms in the same strain upon such laws in Iowa and Minnesota, and upon the New York and Michigan laws against the selling of cigarettes to minors. As no pretense is made of showing that the latter are "sumptuary," or that it is a tendency to luxury and expense which makes them a dead letter in the city of New York and elsewhere, they may be at once dismissed from consideration. A long-time resident of Iowa has something to say in defense of the stigmatized statutes of his adopted State.

The sweeping assertion of Dr. Hammond is in the following terms:

"The laws which several States have enacted relative to the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors are true sumptuary laws, notwithstanding the fact that it is claimed by their adherents that they are measures which every independent State having a regard for the welfare of society is in duty bound to enforce." The first example given to sustain this is a law of Iowa, referred to (after descriptions of the sumptuary laws proper of Sparta, Rome, and England) thus:

"In our own country the experiment has been tried with as much thoroughness and with practically as little result as has attended the attempt by other nations" [i. e., to forbid the people