Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/797

Rh When its advocates assert that those who are determined to have intoxicating beverages will get them, by hook and by crook, spite of all safeguards with which the public weal surrounds itself (an assertion equally strong against powder and dynamite laws, etc., and equally weak), they almost say, but not quite, that those are least prevented from buying who most need to be. This is quite true; but it is an inevitable incident, not of law, but of universal human perversity. There is no help for it save by making men perfect at once. In a prohibition State moderate drinkers will refrain from buying, while abandoned drunkards will buy through the unmanliest, the meanest, and basest expedients. So much the better for the moderate drinkers, anyway and at least, and no worse for the law. A multitude of such persons in Iowa and Kansas to-day praise the laws that protect them from their lower selves. Even our German fellow-citizens, with habits and prejudices brought from "Fatherland," very numerously do the same. But this alone is not the extent of public good secured. Hardened criminals of any sort, whom no law can reach, would soon disappear from natural causes were not their ranks replenished. The drunkards who will lie and cheat, and generally degrade themselves for the means to get drunk, in like manner would soon die out if not reformed. But they are replaced by new recruits from the moderate drinkers alone; and if these largely respect prohibitory laws, though the unhappy beings whom they are on the way to join do not, there will ere long be few to break these laws at all. Unwittingly, the assertion of liquor men that such laws are a "dead letter," so far as it is true—and this is far less than is asserted—only suggests another defense of these laws from their widely experienced "social influence."

One sometimes wonders why license laws, as well as prohibitory ones, are not denounced as "sumptuary"! The fact is, that their natural tendency is to increase the expense of both intemperance and moderate drinking—the liquor-vender charging more for what he sells to cover his expense for a license. This might in some small measure lessen buying, and expense with it, on the part of those who can least afford to buy. Would any one pretend that this is the object of license laws, rather than to balance the notorious injury done by the traffic to the State, by putting the license fees into its treasury? There is one obvious and nearer reason for not misrepresenting license laws as "sumptuary," viz., that however thoroughly enforced they may be, the means of securing the effects of intoxicating drinks, moderate or immoderate, are openly obtainable. Under prohibition, as well enforced, they are not.

It is to be noted that, if the Iowa Legislature had not provided by further legislation against evasions of its statutes (through