Both sides of the prohibition question were well put in a recent conversation between a prominent prohibitionist and Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Church, who has worked industriously for years to decrease the rum influence, but believes restriction is the only means practical. “Bishop,” said the prohibitionist, “if you saw a rattlesnake in the street, biting people and destroying human lives, would you kill it, or try to pen it up?” The bishop replied, “If I had been chasing it up and down the street for thirty years, trying to kill it but never succeeding in doing anything but make it uglier, I would consider myself lucky if I had a chance to pen it up.”
Then should law take the form of restriction? Yes; but immediately the law-makers discover in the words of some satirist of the past generation, that a great many men can be found in favor of a certain provision in law, who are against its enforcement by any method that is suggested in the form of a bill before any Legislature or Congress. A restrictive measure immediately affects a great many business interests. Moralists would like the sale of liquor restricted. Well, so would a great many liquor dealers. If a poll were taken of the wholesale dealers in liquors in the United States, regardless of section or environment, it would be overwhelmingly in favor of limiting the number of rum-shops, and compelling the sale of only the better class of goods. Perhaps the wholesale dealers are not philanthropists, but their work is in the direction of philanthrophy in the respect that they make more money on old and well-refined liquors, and consequently would prefer that nothing else should be sold.
Restriction can be attained in no other way except through license laws, and upon these at once the entire public agree to disagree. A license law that would regulate the traffic in a large city would be utterly destructive of the entire retail liquor interests of the country districts. Consequently the country dealers, through their representatives in Legislatures, protest strongly against any such enactment as the famous Scott bill, which was of such great service in restricting the liquor trade in the State of Ohio. The license exacted from a retailer in a large city would consume the entire profit of a country dealer, even if he were the only one in his town. City prices and country prices are different. It may be also stated upon undoubted authority, for the information of prohibitionists and other gentlemen who have never looked into the practical details of the liquor trade for themselves, that the countryman’s drink compares with that of the city man about as a full bath-tub does to a basin of water.