Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/456

438 , and remorselessly exposes all their transactions, the actual result may be better in the long run than if State and private associations proceeded independently of one another, often duplicating each other's work, or, if not that, working at cross-purposes.

 

IVE years ago it was sought in these pages to discover the cause or causes of the total failure in the United States of prohibitive legislation.

Our conclusion, so far as a conclusion could be said to have been reached, was that the failure lay in the misapplication of ways to means, rather than of means to ends—namely, that an attempt to abolish the crime (or misdemeanor) of drunkenness by punishing, not the criminal, but the community in which he committed the crime, and to prevent law-breaking by legislating out of existence the neutral instrument which happened to form the particular temptation to the particular law-breaker (or with which he found it convenient to commit the crime), was quite too logical to be practicable; as, for instance, laws abolishing the use of spoons, as so many temptations to housebreakers; or of railways, because trespassers on railway tracks were often killed; or steamboats, because steamboat boilers sometimes burst, would be quite too logical for public convenience. Whence it followed that there was no demand for prohibitive liquor laws, and therefore only failure had resulted from attempting to enforce them.

In the five years since that paper was printed almost every one of the United States (in fact, all, with but one exception) have recognized such failure and striven to so recast each its statutes as to plant the responsibility for breach of public order upon the real offender without hardship to the law-abiding classes. The results of these attempts have evolved many novel and unusual contrivances and much curious operation of statutory and statistical wisdom, and some remarkable propositions—so much so that it is believed that an effort to digest them (not by States, but by the principles, or rather by the remedies, attempted) will be interesting consideration for readers of the Popular Science Monthly. If the following summary shall develop two apparent paradoxes—first, that the fewer the places where liquor is sold the larger the consumption of liquor; and, second, that the larger the consumption of liquor the less drunkenness—the present writer can only submit that these 