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a potent cause of crime. There is a poverty which is honorable and conducive to virtue, just as there is an affluence which tends to the growth of every vice. But that degree of poverty which excludes education, which abases and finally destroys selfrespect, which breeds disease, indolence and vice, is conspicuous in every civilized country, and conspicuous as a curse. Of such did the wise man say, 'The destruction of the poor is their poverty."

M. Dupuy, the Director of the French prisons, in his report for 1863, exhibits a diagram showing that, for twenty years, crime against property in France has risen and fallen with the price of grain.

And it is a fact in remarkable confirmation of the theory of these gentlemen, that in our own Commonwealth, crime diminished not only during the years of of the the rebellion, but was less during the very last year, and has not at anytime risen to the amount of detected crime existing before the war. The number of women committed in 1866, was ten per cent. less, and the number of children twenty-five per cent. less, than in 1865. Not even the flow of bad whiskey with which, on the evidence, the whole country is suffering a deluge, has been able to counteract the moral advantages to the humbler classes gained from the

pay, bounties, state aid and high wages of the last few years. There was a constant accumulation of savings, all over the Commonwealth, among persons in humble life, which is evidence of increased comfort, sure to produce greater hopefulness and self-respect.

Still does not poverty owe its own origin oftentimes to drunkenness? Undoubtedly, yes. So also is it due often to luxury and idleness originating in bad moral training, the sudden acquisition of unearned wealth, leading to habits of self-indulgence degenerating into drunkenness and other vices. But, drunkenness in our own modern society, ending in either pauperism or crime, in one of good training, grounded in reasonable intelligence, with the means of comfort, and supported by the inspirations of hope, is a rare and exceptional phenomenon. Drunkenness is, however, one of several causes immediately generating crime and pauperism-the reduction of which to the minimum, is one of the studies and aims of civilization. Yet, the effort to reduce them by a war on the material abused to produce drunkenness, is scarcely less philosophical, than would be an attempt to prevent idleness and luxury, by abolishing property and imitating the legislation of Sparta.

I aver that a statute of prohibition, aiming to banish from the table of an American citizen by pains and penalties, an article of diet, which a large body of the people believe to be legitimate, which the law does not even pretend to exclude from the category of commercial articles, which in every nation, and in some form in all history, has held its place among the necessities or the luxuries of society, is absurdly weak, or else it is fatal to any liberty. Whenever it will cease to be absurdly weak, society by the operation of moral causes, will have reached a point where it will have become useless; or else it will be fatal to any liberty, since, if not useless, but operated and fulfilled by legal force, its execution will be perpetrated upon a body of subjects in whose abject characters there will be combined the essential qualities which are needful to cowardice and servility.

Do you tell me, that no beverage into which alcohol enters, used in cooking, or placed upon the table, fitly belongs to the catalogue of foods?

I answer: That is a question of science, which neither governor nor legislature has any lawful· capacity to solve for the people.

Do you tell me, then, that whether the catalogue be expurgated or not, all such food is unwholesome and unfit to be safely taken?

I answer: That is a question of dietetics. And it is for the profession of medicine. There is, in principle, no odds between proscribing an article of diet and prescribing a dose of physic, by authority of law. The next step will be to provide for the taking of calomel, antimony and Epsom salts by Act of the General Court.

Do you tell me, however, that all such beverages, in their most innocent use, involve a certain danger; that possibly any one may, probably many, and certainly some will, abuse it, and thus abuse themselves; and by consequence that all men, as matter of prudence, and therefore of duty, ought to abstain from and reject it.

I answer: That is a question of morals, for the answer to which we must resort to the Bible, or to the Church, or to the teachings of moral philosophy. The right to answer it at all, or to pretend to any opinion upon it, binding the citizen, has never been committed by the people, in any free government on earth, to the decision of the secular power. If the State can pass between the citizen and his Church, his Bible, his Conscience and God,

upon questions of his own personal habits, and decide what he shall do, on merely moral grounds, then it has authority to invade the domain of thought, as well as of private life, and prescribe bounds to freedom of conscience. There is no barrier, in principle, where the government must stop, short of the establishment of a State Church, prescribed by law, and maintained by persecution.

Do you tell me that the using of wine or beer as a beverage, however temperately, is of dangerous tendency by reason of its example? Do you insist that the temperate use of it by one man may be pleaded by another as the occasion and apology for its abuse?

I answer: that if the government restrains the one man of his own just, rational liberty to regulate his private conduct and affairs, in matters innocent in themselves, wherein he offends not against peace, public decorum, good order, nor the personal rights of any, then the government both usurps undelegated powers, and assumes to punish one man in advance for the possible fault of another. The argument that, because one man may offend, another must be restrained, is the lowest foundation of tyranny, the corner-stone of despotism. Liberty is never denied to the

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