Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/641

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LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL.
621

visions that eatables must or must not be sold where liquor is retailed are about numerically even. (It will be remembered that the New York ["Raines"] law at first abolished free lunches, but insisted that while one must not have food with his liquor on week days, he could not on Sundays have it without—the last provision still being enforced). Similarly, in some States, liquor dealers must not keep lodging houses, while in others they must. West Virginia says that a tavern or hotel must not be used as a liquor-selling establishment only, and that a refusal to give diet or lodging to any one demanding it will forfeit its license to sell liquor. One State (Colorado) recognizes the so-called "gold-cure," and authorizes "the person most interested," or the county, to send habitual drunkards at county expense to "any respectable gold-cure institute." In Illinois a drunkard is by law a vagrant, and drunkenness is a cause for divorce. In Louisiana the excise man who makes an erroneous estimate of the amount of business done (Louisiana regulates the liquor business according to sales only, disclaiming any preventive or reformatory object) is removable from office. In Tennessee applicants for license must state the amount of business they intend to do. Kentucky regulates the price of liquors sold, being the only American State so doing (except that South Carolina says that the price of a potion shall not be "more than fifty per cent above," or if used as a medicine "more than ten per cent above," the cost thereof to the seller—rather a difficult matter to approximate). Arkansas prohibits sales within three miles of a church, schoolhouse, or academy. The sales of liquor to Indians is prohibited, and the exclusive right of army officers to purchase it is conserved, at the proper frontiers. Texas inserts in her statutes a fine for keeping a "blind tiger" (defined to be a place "where intoxicating liquors are sold by any device whereby the party selling or delivering the same is concealed from the person buying or to whom the same is delivered"). And, in Kansas, twenty-five reputable women must unite with twenty-five reputable men in applying for a license to sell liquor. No State or Territory mentions the size or quantity of liquor to be sold at any price, as is the European custom.

It would seem, therefore, that, with the exception of the State of Maine alone, all the American Commonwealths are gradually harking back to the standpoint of the earliest liquor laws. Moderation (temperance) in drinking was the public policy. Leaving out the act of the British Parliament, in the year 1735 (which gave Governor Oglethorpe the right to prohibit the importation of ardent spirits into Georgia, which was not a measure to prevent intoxication, but to give a monopoly to Governor Oglethorpe), the first temperance association was that founded by Dr. Rush; and it is related that the venerable