It was the enforcement of the liquor law which caused most excitement. In New York we suffer from the altogether too common tendency to make any law which a certain section of the community wants, and then to allow that law to be more or less of a dead-letter if any other section of the community objects to it. The multiplication of laws by the Legislature, and their partial enforcement by the executive authorities, go hand in hand, and offer one of the many serious problems with which we are confronted in striving to better civic conditions. New York State felt that liquor should not be sold on Sunday. The larger part of New York City wished to drink liquor on Sunday. Any man who studies the social condition of the poor knows that liquor works more ruin than any other one cause. He knows also, however, that it is simply impracticable to extirpate the habit entirely, and that to attempt too much often merely results in accomplishing too little; and he knows, moreover, that for a man alone to drink whiskey in a bar-room is one thing, and for men with their families to drink light wines or beer in respectable restaurants is quite a different thing. The average citizen, who doesn’t think at all, and the average politician of the baser sort, who only thinks about his own personal advantage, find it easiest to disregard these facts, and to pass a liquor law which will please the temperance people, and then trust to the police department to enforce it with such laxity as to please the intemperate. The results of this pleasing system were evident in New York when our board came into power. The Sunday liquor law was by no means a dead letter in New York City. On the contrary no less than eight thousand arrests for its violation had been made under the Tammany regime the year before we came in. It was very much alive; but it was only executed against those who either had no political pull, or who refused to pay money. The liquor business does not stand on the same footing with other occupations. It always tends to produce criminality in the population at large, and law-breaking among the saloonkeepers themselves. It is absolutely necessary to supervise it rigidly, and impose restrictions upon the traffic. In large cities the traffic cannot be stopped; but the evils can at least be minimized.