Hon. James McGinnis, of the St. Louis bar, several years ago, gave the prohibitory legislation of the whole country (and its practical workings) an exhaustive consideration in all aspects. The results of his study, published to the world, revealed the same condition of affairs in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. On every hand, past and present, he “beheld the impracticability of prohibition.” “I now appeal,” he says, “to the fair-minded reader to give his thoughtful attention to the facts and figures which I have truly and fairly presented, to show that neither crime, pauperism, intemperance, nor any of the ills which are popularly supposed to grow out of intemperance, have been at all lessened by prohibition.” The political economists are practically unanimous in their reprobation of these laws. Adam Smith vigorously protests against their impertinence and presumption. Of sumptuary laws it has been said their enforcement is exceedingly difficult, as it is always harder to superintend consumption than production. “The latter is conducted in definite localities. The former is carried on in the secrecy of a thousand homes. Besides, such laws have very often the effect to make forbidden fruit all the sweeter.” Spite of the penalties attached to their violation, and of redoubled measures of control, government after government have been compelled to admit their failure in this direction. Laws of this nature always involve an abridgement of individual “liberty,” and of the natural right of every man to do what he “will” with his own. They involve the assumption, also, that a government, with the exercise of paternal authority can judge better than the citizen what will best subserve his or her welfare, in the use of what they have. “But such action belongs more properly to the spiritual than to the temporal power. In ancient life, where there was a confusion of the two powers in the state system, sumptuary legislation was more natural than in the modern world, where those powers have been generally, though imperfectly, separated.” “I have learned to doubt,” wrote Dr. Dio Lewis, “whether law is very potent in the cure of moral evil. Force is a good agency in breaking rocks and subduing wild beasts; but in curing immorality, in which we strive to regulate the action and reaction of the faculties and passions of the human soul, force is about as well adapted to our purpose as a sledge-hammer to regulating a watch. Some people seem to have the impression that society is restrained from evil by law; that our wives and daughters are virtuous because there is a law against prostitution; that our exemplary citizens refrain from profanity and excess in gaming and drinking because they are forbidden by law; that somehow society is kept in order by law.