philanthropists may become too exclusively devoted to them. It is, after all, the country that has made the town. Strike out of the list of the active professional men and the merchants of our capitals the men who have come in with characters formed in rural homes, and how wonderful would be the change! If the city is the source of influence, the country is the constant supply of power; and the life of the State depends on the reservoirs of physical, intellectual, and moral Strength that are stored there. The Moffat Law, so called, is a variation of the tax system which has been adopted in Virginia and Louisiana, and already received with considerable favor in other States. It provides for the use of an instrument which is designed to secure the registration of every drink, and requires the dealer to pay a tax of two and one half cents for each glass of spirituous and a half cent for each glass of fermented liquor which he sells. It is supposed that such a scheme will permit the collection of a larger revenue with more uniformity, simplicity, and economy of administration. I shall not discuss its merits in these particulars. It is to be observed that this scheme in Virginia is combined with a license system; as under the law the dealer is first required to obtain a license from a county or corporation court," after satisfying such court that he is "a fit person" (whatever that may mean) to have such privilege, and filing a bond to observe the law, and is to pay therefor a fee of from $50 to $100. As a license law it presents no novel features and calls for no remark. As a tax law it seems to be purely a revenue measure, and of no regulative value. As according to the usages of trade the amount of the tax, and in case of fractions something more, will be added to the price of the commodity, the burden with fall exclusively upon the consumer. ways than one it would seem that the dealer may be a gainer. I assume that the added price is not enough to affect the consumption. Such does not seem to be its design. The increment for each drink is so slight that it will hardly deter the poorest, while in the aggregate of a year's consumption it may perceptibly diminish the vanishing comforts or necessities of the toper's home. There is something horribly dramatic in this immediate con tribution to the public treasury from bar-room drinking. The slang phrase of an invitation to drink in Virginia to-day is, "Will you increase the revenue?" It recalls the lines of Cowper : "Th' Excise is fattened with the rich result -The Winter Evening, v. 504-512. After careful reflection upon this new scheme of taxation we are compelled from weighty considerations to pronounce against it. In a dangerous disease to trifle with placebos, or even with feeble palliatives, is criminal negligence. "Intemperance," says Governor Bagley, in the very Message to which we have alluded, "is the danger of the hour;" and he speaks of the liquor-shops as "places where humanity is made barter of, and dollars traded for degradation." And is a great commonwealth to say of such a traffic that it can neither prohibit, restrain, nor regulate it, and can only make it pay tribute? The problem of law as applied to the liquor traffic stands before us for solution. It presses for a wise and courageous treatment. The Michigan scheme is a hopeless confession of despair. It relinquishes all control of the business except to crush out those too poor to pay for the privilege of making wrecks of manhood. This is to abnegate one of the highest functions and one of the most. solemn duties of the state. But the evil of the law is positive as well as negative. It not only leaves undone what law ought to do, but it does what. law ought not to do. We assume that the ordinary liquor traffic is morally wrong. The state ought not to assume its moral indifference. It ought not to sanction it. To do so is to educate downward the public mind and conscience. It may fairly be conceded that a license is a far more direct and unequivocal endorsement of the Indeed, as shown by Judge is not correct reasoning to 66 traffic and the trafficker than a tax. Cooley in the case above cited, it infer that the state approbates what it taxes. "Taxes are not favors; they are burdens ;" and the learned Judge pertinently adds, "It may be supposed that some idea of special protection is involved when a business is taxed, taxation and protection being reciprocal; . . . but the maxim of reciprocity in taxation has no such meaning. No government undertakes to tax all it protects. It is his liability to taxation at the will of the government that entitles him to protection, and not the circumstance of his being actually taxed." From which it follows that his claim upon the state for protection is not enlarged or affected by the exercise of this right. The police power of the state is not curtailed, and the state is not bound to protect what is injurious to it. This may be satisfactory to the logical understanding; in the forum of the courts it is conclusive; but still the vital question for us is, How does such legislation strike the popular mind? The objection to it on the part of those opposed to the liquor traffic may be, as the court say, sentimental;" but that does not dispose of it. He is a very poor practical statesman who does not take into account the sentiments of a people, especially if they take the form of moral instincts. As factors which enter into the formation of opinion and the guidance of conduct they are not less important than the reason and the judgment. If to the common mind among both the supporters and opponents of the liquor traffic it seems that the government by taxation places the trade on the footing of a legitimate business, this lulls the conscience of the one and blunts the attacks of the other. And I apprehend there is no doubt that such is the practical estimate made of the tendency of such a law. Lord Chesterfield, a thorough man of the world as he was, broke forth in a memorable debate in the House of Lords during the last century, in a strain of indignation as natural as it was forcible when he exclaimed: "Luxury, my lords, is to be taxed, but vice prohibited, let the difficulty in the law be what it will. Would you lay a tax upon a breach of the ten commandments? Would not such a tax be wicked and scandalous? Would it not imply an indulgence to all those who could pay the tax? Vice, my lords, is not properly to be taxed, but suppressed." A simple test seems to us conclusive as to the instinctive moral judgment of men in this matter. Let us take an admitted vicious pursuit, which we have not been accustomed to see dealt with by the law except in the way, of suppression. Suppose it were proposed to collect a tax upon brothel-keepers. Would it not be a public scandal? Even the National Government, in the time of the war, when it "sought out every invention" to create taxes, did not venture on this. It is undoubtedly true that these considerations will affect different minds unequally. To some the moral sentiments are among the most vital of forces, and to pervert or deaden these is at once one of the saddest and one of the most disastrous results. To others the world seems moved by self-interest, and to enlist that apparently on the wrong side is the greatest of calamities. Those of us who are not inclined to this extreme view of human selfishness as the absolutely determining power in human affairs, are yet fully impressed with the immense power for evil which results from the alliance of the love of money with any of the baser passions. And here we come upon a most formidable objection to the system of legislation under consideration; it tends to create in the state an apparent pecuniary interest in the maintenance of the dramshop. The history of England has repeatedly shown how dangerous it is to ally the national interest with gigantic systems of wrong. The peace of Utrecht in 1713, which, as Mr. Lecky observes, by securing to England the monopoly of the slave-trade to the Spanish colonies made England "the great slave-trader of the world," was, so far as that clause was concerned, received in that country with such universal favor, that the same historian says it does not yet appear to have occurred to any class that a national policy which made it its main object to encourage the kidnapping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery" was "inconsistent with the spirit of the Christian religion." It is always easier to see our neighbors' wickedness than it is our own; and so we call attention. again to the horrors of that opium traffic which England forced upon China at the cannon's mouth for the sake of the immense revenue poured in to her Indian treasury; and at this day, despite Indian famines, the government for this sake grows "upon millions of acres of what ought to be food-producing land in that country the opium to send to China." Said Sir Walter C. Trevelyan lately: " And to the shame of England be it spoken, this infamous opium trade is a monopoly of our government! We grieve to think that the Empress of India can have been advised to sanction such an iniquity." Here and there a brave man like Canon Wilberforce responds that he "cannot help remembering those terrible words that look you in the face out of the book of the prophet Jeremiah like a glowing coal, 'They shall be ashamed of their revenues, because of the fierce anger of the Lord.'" But the leaders of opinion are silent. How horrible seems this deadening of conscience in a Christian nation! The liquor traffic itself presents in England an appalling bribe against any effective legislation for its diminution. The returns. of revenue for the United Kingdom for the year 1877 show that the traffic contributed £7,478,156 from the customs, and £25,969,126 from the excise; making a total of £33,447,282, or over one hundred and sixty millions of dollars, and being over a third of the whole colossal revenue of the nation. A reform that threatens this must stir the very depths of the human heart and lay hold on the heights of religious motives, and then call for heroic effort. Not only the reformers, but intelligent journalists and students of public affairs, have come to recognize the gravity of the alliance between the Publicans and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.' In the United States the distribution of taxation between the Federal and State governments is such that the revenue from the liquor trade does not so aggregate itself as to assume 1 As a curious illustration of the chronic disposition of all financiers to look at the consumption of liquors from their narrow standpoint, we quote this passage from Mr. Lecky: "In a very valuable paper on The State of the Revenue of Scotland,' drawn up about 1742, Duncan Forbes laments bitterly the decline of the duty on beer and ale. The cause of the mischief we complain of,' he says, is 'evidently the excessive use of tea.'"' Had he lived, he would have been consoled by the faithful persistence of the Scotch in paying duties and taxes upon whisky. |