Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/458

440 In these remaining forty-eight States and Territories of the Union the statistics regulating liquor seem to divide themselves, as to the remedies attempted, into ten heads, as follows:

 I. Abolish all liquor laws except those for revenue. II. Example. III. Education. IV. Government control of all warehousing and sales. V. Regulation of hours for retailing liquors. VI. Refusal of employment to drinkers. Change of pay-day. VII. Personal damage law. VIII. Encourage the use of light wines and beers; remove all duties or imposts on food products; quality inspection. IX. High revenue—national, interstate, or State. X. Local option.

For No. I, pure and simple, we have but a single report, perhaps (as of a frontier State) not exemplary, or safe to guide the more interior States, but given exactly for what it may be worth. The Governor of Montana (a State which boasts the bad eminence of having proportionately more liquor-sellers paying license fees than any other State in the Union—having, in fact, one licensed liquor-seller to every fifty-five inhabitants) reports as follows:

"Saloons are run wide open night and day; while there is a great deal of drinking there is very little drunkenness, and one in an intoxicated condition is promptly arrested and fined." One other State, however (Louisiana), has the continental idea that liquor laws are for "revenue only." Louisiana, therefore, has an elaborate excise, guiltless of any suggestion of reformative objects. So far as her statistics go, she is the most temperate State in the Union.

II. .—This may be called the apostolic cure—the one laid down by the apostle St. Paul (I Corinthians, viii, 13)—though we find a prominent English ecclesiastic, Dean Hole, on being asked if he was not aware that people ought to abstain for the sake of their example to others, replied: "I have never seen any one converted by example. I have often challenged teetotalers to produce Mr. Jones converted by the example of Mr. Brown, but I am waiting for him. I don't see why I should make a fool of myself because others do." I should not deal with the matter quite so summarily myself. Doubtless the example of a thrifty, wholesome, prosperous laborer, if left (without exhortation or impertinence of third parties) to work upon his dram-drinking, wretched neighbor, might have its laudable effect: such example not being deprived in advance of its value by the fetters of a written pledge which a man's personal pride might force him to ostentatiously observe—or if the exemplary person does not get his living by denouncing liquor—or by the