[Footnote 2: Report of General James Appleton to the Legislature of Maine, July 15, 1837.] Admitting, as all the world does admit, that the abolition of drunkenness is desirable, against such pitiless, such iron, logic as this, there is no appeal, and from it there is no escape even to-day. But the trouble was, and is, that it is placing an entire Commonwealth in time of peace under martial law. It was in the fitness of things that General Appleton, a soldier, who had seen intoxication in a form most likely to impress him with dangers to the public--i. e., in soldiers to whom the safety of the State in time of war was intrusted--should have brought in the first prohibition law on record;[3] and that, in the teeth of more than two generations of failure, the sovereign State of Maine should have adhered to his martial logic, with the loss of her commerce and the reduction of her census, is a tribute to both the logic of a soldier or the self-insistence of the State which must compel admiration! In sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle. She has seen not only her contemporary sister States, but those admitted yesterday and the day before, pass her in affluence and prosperity. But the only remedy for her failure she will listen to the suggestion of is an increased severity of prohibition statutes and an increased crucifixion of her law-abiding citizens, lest one of her own or a single stranger within her gates should obtain a glass of alcoholic compound within her borders. [Footnote 3: General Appleton was commander of the First Brigade of the Second Division of Massachusetts infantry in the War of 1812-1815, his resignation dating 1828.] But, cling as the State of Maine may to the fierce logic of prohibition, it appears that her forty-eight sisters have found its unappealable rigor too rigid, and have modulated it in the diverse ways now to be considered. In these remaining forty-eight States and Territories of the Union the statistics regulating liquor seem to divide themselves, as to the remedies attempted, into ten heads, as follows: I. Abolish all liquor laws except those for revenue. II. Example. III. Education. IV. Government control of all warehousing and sales. V. Regulation of hours for retailing liquors. VI. Refusal of employment to drinkers. Change of pay-day. VII. Personal damage law. VIII. Encourage the use of light wines and beers; remove all duties or imposts on food products; quality inspection. IX. High revenue--national, interstate, or State. X. Local option.