The details are here omitted but “the total reaches the enormous amount of $220,000. The records of the Insane Hospital show a gradual increase of patients caused by excessive use of intoxicating liquors. At the present time that institution has nearly double the number of inmates from that cause alone, which it had when the present prohibitory law was enacted. While the law, with singular inconsistency, does not recognize pure and beneficial kinds of intoxicating liquors as property when intended for sale by other than city or town agencies, and makes no distinction between the sale of adulterated liquors and pure liquors, it authorizes their indiscriminate sale in numerous city and town agencies. Liquor-drinking is not done openly to so great an extent but the consumption is as large. It is notorious that quantities of strong liquors have for years been transported into the state from the Provinces, and especially from Massachusetts, which has drained us of millions of dollars which might have been kept at home under liberal laws. Liquor runners from New York and Boston penetrate every nook and corner of our state to rob our people and eat out their substance. Liquors are also imported in bond, and under the protection of the Federal Government they cannot be seized in bulk. They are consumed in families and in club-rooms which have been organized in large towns and cities, under that most dangerous guise of social drinking. The liquor agencies authorized by law have vended in some years more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of liquors for medicinal, mechanical and manufacturing purposes only, as is supposed. We consider these liquor agencies as leeches upon the people. The question is whether a law, the severity of which is without example, having failed to accomplish the ends for which it was designed, according to experience and the testimony of officials serving under it, who with singular unanimity give their verdict against it, ought to be so amended that cider, native wines, ale, porter and particularly lager beer, shall not be considered within the meaning of the statute.