Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/632

 as it now remembers the days of the stagecoach or the tallow-dip, a time when a man desiring a dram of liquor was obliged to drink whatever the dram-seller found it profitable to sell him.

We have tried about everything else. Why not try this? We have conceded to our legislators the right and the jurisdiction. Since we can not adopt Mr. Reed's proposition to feed everybody, why not enter the wedge right here and do the next best or a next best thing—see that the people not only eat proper meats and fruits, but that they drink, if drink they will, pure liquors? And it need be added (however it may appear to be a sop to Cerberus) that it would not antagonize that most powerful class, whose organized and capitalized opposition every other liquor-regulating law which has ever been suggested has at once antagonized, and been obliged in the end to if not conciliate, at least to recognize in the adjustment of equities. Fortunately, we have not to begin our experiments out of whole cloth. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington have led the way, and made the adulteration of liquor a misdemeanor. (New York, however, has probably negatived the best results of the prohibition by adding that the prohibited adulteration must only be "with any deleterious drug, substance, or liquor which is poisonous or injurious to the health," which is shutting one door and opening another, and relegating to the lawyers and their experts a tedious inquisition as to what the word "poisonous" or the term "injurious to health" may mean, in the course of which the offender would walk free.) The question as to whether it would conserve the public peace as well as the public safety by decreasing drunkenness can only be favorably conjectured. Experience of such a law only can show. To begin with, it would increase the cost of a dram. A glass of true whisky, for example, might be twenty cents instead of ten, and (the law forbidding adulteration) this would probably in itself lessen dram-drinking. In England, many years ago, a similar law was found to eventuate in compelling that only the highest grades of ale should be sold at a certain price. This led to the offering of a second, and then of a third grade, and finally of what was claimed to be a blending of all three grades or an "entire" (which was the origin of the term entire, that later began to be the name of an alehouse—a legend still seen on English alehouse signs). But the law we now suggest, by preventing the blending of three grades of spirits, might, while lessening the sales, increase the excise revenues, and perhaps accomplish whatever may be left to be accomplished in conserving at once the health, the peace, and the income of the State.

That a system by which only pure liquors can be exposed for sale as beverages is feasible, seems already assured, the States of