"Whatever revenue license pays the State is fully counterbalanced by the increased cost of jails, poorhouses and police, for which the patient public pays immense taxation. The moral burdens from the infamous traffic are all additional to the financial."] CHAPTER XVII. LICENSE A FAILURE AND A DISGRACE. For over two hundred years in this country, and for a much longer period of time in Great Britain and some of the countries of Continental Europe, attempts have been made to protect the people against the evils of intemperance by restrictive liquor laws. But as these laws were permissive and not prohibitory, the evil was not restrained. Nay, its larger growth came as the natural consequence of such laws, for they not only gave to a few men in every community the right to live and grow rich by doing all in their power to increase the evil, but threw around them the protection of the State; so leaving the people powerless in their hands. HISTORY OF LICENSE IN MASSACHUSETTS. The history of all restrictive laws which have stopped short of absolute prohibition, is a history of the saddest of failures, and shows that to license an evil is to increase its power. Judge Robert C. Pitman, in his "Alcohol and the State," an exceedingly valuable discussion of the "Problem of Law as Applied to the Liquor Traffic," gives an instructive history of the license laws of Massachusetts from early colonial times down to the year 1877. The experience of Massachusetts is that of every other community, State or nation, which has sought to repress drunkenness and its attendant evils by the enactment of license laws; and we ask the reader's earnest and candid consideration of the facts we shall here present.