Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, September 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, September 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
exceedingly high license, the reduction in one year was 200 in the
number of saloons, while the increase of revenue was $1,250,000; and
yet the decrease in the number of arrests was 1,217. Contrast this
result with the condition of affairs in the triple-steel-barred
prohibition State of Maine! Says an ex-Mayor of Portland: "I went into
office perfectly free; I think I enforced the law impartially with
all the vigor I could control.... I looked it all over to see what I
had accomplished; I found that I had driven out of the business one
set of men, and another had come in worse than the first. I found that
the young men were establishing club rooms. Not only did they become
drinking places, but they brought in gambling and other vice. While I
was driving liquor out of the ordinary shops I was driving it into
houses and kitchens, where even children dealt in it.... I am sorry to
say it, but the law makes perjury alarmingly common; it opens up ...
an avenue for bribes.[B]
[Footnote B: Annual Report of the New York State Commissioner of
Excise, 1897-1898, p. 716, Id.]
"The local authorities could not be trusted to enforce the law. The
price of liquors has been lessened and the quality is worse.... To
those who shunned the open bars the apothecary shops supplied liquor
by the bottle as often as desired.... Then arose pocket peddlers,
young men who loiter about the street supplying customers from the
bottle with a drink known as splits--a concoction of the cheapest
alcohol mixed with a dash of rum and coloring matter, which produces a
dangerous form of intoxication.... At the city agency the question
'Medicine?' and the answer 'Yes,' was quite sufficient, and throngs of
people were constantly waiting with flasks to be filled.... 'Bars,'
'Eating Houses' (so called because protected by the police), 'Kitchen
Bars,' 'Pocket Peddlers,' 'Hotel Bars,' 'Apothecary Shops,' 'Bottling
Houses,' 'Express Companies,' 'Clubs,' and the 'City Agency.'"
But all these, under the very eye of the late Hon. Neal Dow, were
powerless to convince the Hon. Neal Dow that his policy was not a
massive and monumental success, and to the end of his days the good
old man delivered glowing eulogiums upon its exalted benefits to a
suffering and liquor-ridden world!
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