intoxication, prepares himself on Saturday night for a Sunday’s drinking bout. “No license less than three hundred dollars,” suggest the cannie property-holders; and, presto! higher adulteration; more poison in the drink; a higher rate per glass, it may be, but not a tippling-shop less in country or city. “No license at all,” is the next cry. It is tried; adulteration becomes still more barefaced, but the same amount of drinking is done, it can hardly be said clandestinely, for it is done in the face of day, and everybody knows or may know of it. Macrae’s _America_ tells us that when an investigation was instituted into the workings of the prohibitory or no-license system in Boston, there were found to be in that city over two thousand places where liquor was vended by the glass, and that the average annual amount spent per head (men, women, and children included) for liquor in the entire State was a little over ten dollars. “_We’re all for the Maine Law here_,” said a man to Mr. Macrae, “_but we’re agin its enforcement_.” It may here be stated once for all, without possibility of successful contradiction, that not one of these laws, whether for Sunday-closing, higher license, no license, partial license, or entire prohibition, ever was carried out, or ever had any other effect than possibly to add to the cost, and certainly to enlarge illicit distillation and set an enhanced premium on the adulteration of liquors. Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi! Maine was obliged, after a few years’ trial, to abrogate her prohibitory law; and the most ardent favorers of _local option_, which has now had a full and fair trial in many States, confess it a failure. Our own experience of it is that drunkenness is nowhere so rife as in the midst of those very regions where no license is granted and entirely prohibitory laws are supposed to prevail; and there is surplusage of testimony to the facts.