are you under the simple obligations that would rest on Robinson Crusoe, excluding his man Friday. You are not living by yourselves.

A friend of this cause very well said, "Talk about the sin per se of the sale or use of a glass of liquor. There is no per se about it." That is, there is no drinking and selling, by themselves, about it. There is no per se about it. Every man has a social power, and helps swell the tide of social influence; and no man can drink or sell intoxicating liquors as beverages, without trampling upon and violating the social law; and, if he knows what the truth is, if his conscience is enlightened on the subject of moral influence and personal example, he sins against society and against God.

I feel bound to refer to a high counter authority, or rather opinion, (for no man is authority on this subject,) that of John Stuart Mill. Mr. Mill has evidently not joined the total abstinence society. He believes in the right of the individual to take his glass of liquor, and looks upon it as a mere personal consideration. He does, however, admit this:-"Whenever there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law."

The Secretary of the British Temperance Alliance, in his letter to Lord Stanley, says:

"If anything invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery, I am taxed to support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralizing society, from which I have a right to claim. mutual aid and intercourse."

Mill says:

"A theory of social rights, the like of which probably never found its way into distinct language-being nothing short of this-that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance."

You observe the principle at issue. Mr. Mill admits that when there is a definite or specific injury or danger to the public, the law may interfere; but his doctrine is that, in the use of intoxicating drinks, there is no such specific or definite injury, or hazard of injury, as warrants the government in interfering; that, if it is an encroachment

upon private rights, the consequences which may arise are so vague that they cannot be noticed. Apply his logic to other laws, in regard to which our whole public is a unit. Take the laws respecting obscene books and prints. Is the injury to the community, which they bring, any more definite, any more specific than that involved in the use of liquors as beverages?

Turn to the law which arrests your truant children. It is not a sin per se to walk the streets; yet the hazards of ignorance justify the Commonwealth in enacting laws upon that subject, taking it out of the domain of individual rights, and placing it in the domain of law.

Take the law prohibiting the employment of children in the manufactories of the Commonwealth, unless they attend school a certain length of time in every year; or take, indeed, our entire public school system. What right has the Commonwealth to tax any one of you to maintain the common and high schools for the instruction of the poor and friendless. Ignorance is a vague and indefinite hazard to the community. Yet out of that vague and indefinite danger comes the right to maintain this system by taxation. It is true that A, B, C and D might see the necessity of this without law;

but E, F, and G might not; hence the law does not hesitate to disregard the feelings, wishes, and, in some instances, the consciences, of a portion of the people, and impose the burden of taxation upon the whole people with this single point in view.

There is another matter to which I desire to call your attention. Few, if any, witnesses here have pointedly denied the right of the government to maintain a prohibitory law. Perhaps Ex-Governor Clifford is an exception to this remark. When asked if such an enactment does not transcend the legitimate authority of the State, he answered, "undoubtedly." At the same time, he proceeded to say that the State has a right to enact laws, which, without attempting the impossible, shall restrain both the sale and use of intoxicating beverages. Precisely this, in principle, and no more the present law accomplishes. The degree and extent of that restraint, is another matter, and does not turn upon the question of legislative authority.

The Hon. Joel Parker, the most learned man in the law, perhaps, before the Committee, did not condemn the law on this ground. When asked his opinion on this point, he said that, "if the prohibitory law could be executed so as entirely to suppress drunkenness, without any evil to the community

from the absence of the means of drunkenness," he was "not prepared to say that a prohibitory law might not be a subject of legislation, without regarding the sale and use of intoxicating beverages as especially sinful." Then, it is a question of expediency, gentlemen, and not of the rights of people.

Judge Sanger, one of the most intelligent and honest men that has been on the witness stand, from the beginning to the end of the hearingthough, in his opinions concerning a license law, differing from the remonstrants-did not hesitate to say that, while he regarded the prohibitory law as in some respects trenching on private rights, all arbitrary social law does the same; and our system of taxation to repair the damages done by the liquor traffic, in like manner trenches upon private natural right. And when asked the question, whether these evils were not incomparably greater than any that could result from prohibition, he said that, "putting it in that way, which of the two he should prefer, unrestrained sale, or absolute prohibition, he should prefer prohibition." If we are to join issue on the question of rights, the honest, sober, industrious people of the Commonwealth claim the right to be delivered from the tax of four millions, more or less,