REPORTS OF SELECT COMMITTEES.

The Select Committee, to whom was referred

No. 178, S.,

A bill to quiet the title to real estate in certain cases.

Has had the same under consideration, and report it back with the recommendation that it be printed and referred to the committee on Judiciary. E. C. McFETRIDGE,

So ordered.

The Select Committee, to whom was referred

No. 125, S.,

Committee.

A bill to authorize the commissioners of public lands to loan a portion of the trust funds of the state to the city of Manitowoc, in Manitowoc county.

Report the same back, and ask that it be printed and referred to the committee on State Affairs.

So ordered.

The Special Committee, to whom was referred

No. 173, S.,

JOS. RANKIN.

A bill to create the county of Marinette, and provide for the organization of the same.

Have had the same under consideration and report the same back by substitute, and ask that the substitute be printed, and referred to the committee on Town and County Organization.

So ordered.

THOMAS B. SCOTT.

The Special Cor mittee, to whom was referred

No. 176, S.,

A bill to amend chapter 20 of the revised statutes of 1878, entitled of public printing.

Beg leave to report the same back with amendment, and recommend its passage when so amended.

A. D. ANDREWS, Chairman.

A minority of the Joint Special Committee to whom was referred petitions relating to amendment to constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of liquors, beg leave to make following report:

The right of petition is a constitutional and essential right. When any considerable number of the people petition the legislative branch of the gov. ernment of the state on whatever subject, it is proper that the petition be respectfully heard, and it the request is reasonable and just, and for the interest of all the people to be affected by the legislation asked, to grant the prayer of such petition by the enactment of the law demanded, or, as in this case, the submission to the people of an amendment to the state constitution to prohibit the manufacture and traffic in intoxicating liquors in the state of

Wisconsin. So, on the other hand, if the petition and the act demanded, is not reasonable, just, or for the best interest of all the people represented here, to give good reasons for the refusal to accede to the prayer and wishes of the petitioners.

There seems to be this peculiarity about some of the numerous petitions referred to the Joint Select Committee. The names appear to be all in one hand, as though somebody had constituted himself a committee of one, on the question of the "right of petition," while in many other instances it appears, and no attempt is made to disguise or conceal the fact, that some women, and many boys and girls are the signers, and in one notable instance, a convocation of twenty or thirty reverend gentlemen say they speak for thirty-two thousand people (?) These facts are alluded to in no way of ridicule or charge of impropriety, but only as historical matter, and in opposition to the plea that so many legal voters demand at this time, this new agita tion and expense of a constitutional amendment.

Not agreeing with the conclusions arrived at by the majority of the Special Joint Committee, to which was referred the petition of so many respectable people, citizens and residents and tax payers of the state, for the submission of a constitutional amendment touching the traffic in intoxicating liquors, and the joint resolution now reported for adoption, which reads as follows: “Joint Resolution. Resolved by the senute, the assembly concurring, That the constitution be amended by adding an additional article, number fifteen, to read as follows: Article 15. Section 1. The manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in this state, except strictly for use in the arts and as a medicine, is forever prohibited."

"Section 2. The legislature shall, at its first session after the adoption of this article, provide for its enforcement by appropriate legislation."

The undersigned respectfully submits this minority report thereon, and recommends the indefinite postponement of the joint resolution, and adverse to the request of the petitioners. The reasons for such dissent and recommendation may be stated in the following order:

First. The contemplated amendment would be an attempt to legislate an idea of morality which is opposite to that sense of individual right in many citizens to their enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that no political or other majority can or ought to prohibit by law.

Second. The contemplated legislation would be impolitic, as tending to array parties and factions against each other on a question that ought not to enter into politics.

Third. The contemplated amendment and subsequent legislation could not be enforced while the sentiment of so many, even though not strictly a polit ical majority, were opposed to the enforcement of sumptuary laws, or acts tending to the arbitrary regulation of diet, dress or religious belief.

Fourth. The proposed amendment would be void, and in violation of the constitution of the United States, and the many acts of congress that are, by the federal constitution, made binding and obligatory on the several states of our North American Union.

Premising that the undersigned is no foe to temperance, believing always in restraining and controlling the use and abuse, so far as it can be done consistently, with that idea of the liberty of conscience which is the very groundwork of constitutional or free popular government, of any hurtful element, whether it be of dress, food or social relaxation, the point when that exercise of care, restraint and reformatory method ceases, and the tyranny of one idea, or even the idea of many, is substituted, is one of much anxiety to the lover of constitutional liberty in the enjoyment of the guarantied rights which are not hereafter to be curtailed or denied by the majority against the protest of the minority, of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;" a happiness that may honestly and consistently found in a Methodist camp meeting, or German turner society picnic, where malt or other exhilarating beverages are used as freely and innocently as water is intended to be in the other.

The objection to compulsory holiness, goodness, temperance, etc., is the same old one that sent martyrs to the stake, Puritans to the wilds of North America, that wrung Magna Charta from King John, and wrote the fiery gospel of constitutional liberty upon the pages of that Declaration of Independence that we annually read as the new political creed of freemen.

15- S. J.

Said John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, when arguing this question of prohibition in that mesterly production of the great War Governor of New England, being known as an argument on the Errors of Prohibition," delivered in the Representatives' Hall, Bo ton, April 3, 1867, before the Joint Special Committee of the General Court of Massachusetts, the question then being very like the question before this legislature on a petition praying for prohibitory legislation in regard to the control and sale of intoxicating liquors:

Do not let us deceive ourselves into reversing the order of our own history. If drunkenness is the essential parent cause, and not usually the mere concomitant or consequence of social degredations, there ought to be a time found somewhere far back in the former ages when our own ancestors were sober, virtuous and happy; but when visited by the seductive fruit of the vine and falling into the snare of unwonted and alluring temptation, the shadow of a great woe came over them, never to pass away until the wine shall cease to redden in the cup. But the truth is otherwise. There has never been any such day of innocence and happiness since Adam was banished from Eden. And yet it is not difficult to trace back the steps of the progress of that country from which Americans sprung to the times long be fore the introduction of spirits, or wizes, or beer, or even ale itself, into England.

"The evil of drunkenness is needed to be met by a gracious gospel kindling the heart, and not by a crushing sense of guilt goading the conscience. The temperance reformation sprung up out of the hearts of a deeply moved humanity. It was truly and genuinely a gospel work. It was a mission of love and hope, and the power with which it wrought was the evidence of its inspiration. While it held fast by its original simplicity; while it pleaded with the self-forgetfulness of gospel discipleship, and sought out with the generosity of an all-embracing charity; while it twined itself around the heatstrings, and quietly persuaded the erring, or with an honest boldness rebuked without anger-it was strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might, verifying the prophecy of old, that "one might chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight."

"But when it passed out of the hands of its evangelists and passed into the hands of the centurions and the hirelings; when it became a part of the capital of political speculation, and went into the jugglery of the caucus; when men voted to lay abstinence as a burden on their neighbors, when they felt no duty of abstinence themselves (even under the laws of their own creation); when the gospel, the Christian church, and the ministers of religion, were yoked to the car of a political triumph; then it became the victim of one of the most ancient and dangerous of all the delusions of history."

Calling now to the stand two distinguished divines, on this question of attempting to legislate men temperate, Archbishop Manning, in an address delivered before the Total Abstinence Alliance, of Manchester, England, said: "I have no hesitation, no false shame, in declaring in the presence of you all, that I am a total abstainer, or, as you may call it, a teetotaler; and it is my purpose, by all the means that I can use, to get everybody to do the same, to give up entirely the use of intoxicating drinks, and, therefore, to give up entirely ever putting their foot in a public house. Now, my friends, listen, I will go to my grave without tasting intoxicating liquors. But I repeat distinctly that any man who would say that the use of wine or any other like thing is sinful, when it does not lead to drunkenness, that man is a heretic, condemned by the Catbolic church. With that man I will never work. As I intend to work with all my heart and soul with those faithful Catholics, so with all my heart and soul I will never work with any man not faithful to the church.

"Now I desire to promote total abstinence in every way I can. I will use all my persuasion, I will encourage all societies, I will be present at their meetings; but the moment I see men not charitable, attempting to trample down those who do not become total abstainers, and who might prefer to be temperance men - from that moment I will not work with those men. I had in my hand this morning a periodical in which a writer at tempted to maintain that it was not lawful to use wine even at the altar. And this false doctrine is getting among some Catholics. In the strongest lan

guage, and with all the power I have, let me condemn this doctrine. It is a denial of God's word, and against the true doctrine of God as the Creator of the world. I would have two kinds of pledges, one for the mortified man who never tastes drink, and another for the temperate man who never abuses it. If I can make these two classes work together, I will work in the midst of them. If I cannot make them work together, I will work with them sep arately."

The Right Rev. J. Roosevelt Bayley, then bishop of Newark, New Jersey, said in 1872, when discussing before a vast audience this doctrine of prohibition by legal enactments:

"It is a subject very much discussed, and has of late excited a good deal of attention in this state. For with it we may connect also the so-called Local Option Law,' which is of the same character, although different in certain respects. I have endeavored to obtain information in regard to this matter, and Lave not been very successful. Such means of information as I have been able to lay my hands on are all of a very contradictory character; some persons asserting that this law or the application of it had been successful, others that it has been an entire failure. There are, however, some objections to it that suggest themselves to the mind of any one who sets himself seriously to reflect upon it.

"In the first place, it has a very strong odor of what we are accustomed to call the old blue laws,' and that is not much in its favor. Then, there is a danger of its carrying what may be called the power of majorities, into matters which do not properly belong to them. Majorities, as we are all aware, are by no means infallible, especially in our country, where, to use a common expression, it takes so much oil in order to have the machine go on. It would be a strange state of affairs if, in a town of 5,000 inhabitants, 2,501 should say to 2,449 that they should not drink anything, no matter how much they might wish it. If you carry this power of the majority to this extent, it would be very difficult to say where it would end. But, not to dwell on other objections and there are many that come to my mind I am afraid, and from conversation with people from Maine and Massachusets I have reason to believe that there is some ground for my apprehensions, that this law creates hypocrisy, falsehood, duplicity; and such legislation should be avoided. Any law is bad that lowers the moral tone of the community."

Now in quoting from these distinguished divines, the undersigned desires to make this point in connection with the argument. That moral suasion and practical christianity will effect far more than all the constitutional or other enactments that can be devised on this subject. The temperance reform movement started in the Catholic church alone, with such great and faithful sponsors as Father Matthew, Father Burke, and others, have made of our Irish fellow-citizens, so to speak, temperately new men. Sobriety and industry with them, in this state, the rule now, that had, many years ago most notable and frequent exception. Let that eminent English leader and thinker, the true friend always of America, speak here. Says John Stuart Mill:

"There are in our day gross usurpations on the liberty of private life actually practiced, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions proposed which assert the unlimited right in the public, not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but, in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit any number of things which it thinks innocent. Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people of one English colony, and of nearly half the United States, have been interdicted by law from making any use whatever of fermented drinks except for medical purposes, for prohibition of their sale is, in effect, as intended to be. prohibition of their use. The infringement complained of is not on the liberty of the seller, but on that of the buyer and consumer; since the state might just as well forbid him to drink wine as purposely make it impossible for him to obtain it. The secre ary, however [of the English "Alliance"], says: "I claim, as a citizen, the right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another."

And now for the definition of these social rights: "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 misery I am taxed to support. It impedes my right of free moral and intellectual development by surrounding my path with dangers, and weakening and demoralizing society, from which I have a right to obtain mutual aid and intercourse." A theory of social rights, the like of which probably never before found its way into definite 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. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single inte ference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify. It acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except, perhaps, to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them.

When, by attempted legislation, we once enter the strict domain and field of individual action, as it relates to diet, dress or religious belief, there can be no limit to the subjects that may need, and receive legislative prohibition, as this or that faction may succeed to the temporary or even permanent control of the state. If we are told that the home of the drunkard is sad and desolate, his wife neglected, and his children ahungered and he a possible criminal, we admit it; and yet we may hesitate long before we say that because of that great wrong done we will do a further wrong, and deprive another of the innocent use of that which brings to his family and himself no shame, no want, no crime or degredation. If it is said that our insane asylums contain many that were driven to insanity by drink, we point to the statistics, so well authenticated, that far more are made hopelessly insane on account of religious beliefs and excitements. If we are informed that murder, robbery and suicide are the attendants of the drunkard, may we not answer that questions arising out of the domestic relations have caused more murders than rum? Love of gold more robberies than all the fermented drinks since the patriarch Noah's first debauch?

That unrequited love, poverty and religious excitement produce more suicides by a hundred fold than the bite of the worm of the still? And shall we abolish the domestic relations so that there shall be no jealous or wronged husbands or wives to breed murder? Become communists so that gold and property shall be so common that robbery will not occur to possess it? Prohibit the exercise of religious belief and church exercises because insanity and suicides have followed in the wake of Moody and Sankey missions, and Methodist or other revivals? Against the dark picture that may be so easily and pathetically drawn of some "unfortunate, gone to his death," from the abuse of alcoholic drinks we may put on record here a startling fact, occurring but a few miles from this capitol building, and within the month past. We cite it in full as cut from a daily newspaper of the period indicated:

"ATTEMPTED SUICIDE.

[Special dispatch to the Sentinel.]

PALMYRA, January 22.

A well-known married lady of this place made un unsuccessful attempt at suicide by drowning herself in the big springs, better known from its size and peculiar color as the " Blue Hole," at the foot of the Bidwell House, at nine o'clock last evening. She was followed and rescued just in time; a few days since she attempted to cut her throat. Her reasons for attempting self murder, which she declares she will yet accomplish, are that her husband does not provide the necessities of life for herself and children, giving all of his limited means, instead, towards the support of services in the Free Methodist church, that is now enjoying a series of revival meetings. Sympathizing friends will endeavor to overcome her temporary insanity, and prevent further attempt at suicide. It might not be amiss for this church to instruct its hearers that He who faileth to provide for his own is worse than an infidel.'"

Now, because of this melancholy event (thousands of a like nature might be found and quoted here), shall we amend our state constitution, and frame