The use of intoxicating liquor or strong drink has been known in all countries and from the earliest times; drunkenness must have been and was equally well known. In no system, even of heathenism, has intoxication been recommended; and in none, save that of Mohammed, has abstinence from liquor been enjoined. The Old and New Testaments, while teeming with allusions to the use of _wine_ and _strong drink_, nowhere lay down any precept forbidding their use, but frequently by the clearest implication, and in a few instances by express injunction, command the use of both; and the manufacture of wine _must_, by the institution of our Blessed Saviour, be kept up so long as the world shall exist. There is _no_ proof for the assertion, that alcohol is not food, and _less_ for the averment that it has no efficacy as a remedial agent. The taste for liquor is a natural one and inherent to all men, but probably stronger and more necessary of gratification among hard-working men, and in damp or cold climates, than in the case of sedentary persons or in mild and hot countries. It is _not_ the province of civil government to remove temptation to the infraction of the moral law; its province is _to keep order_ and _to punish infractions_ of law. To pass a series of totally prohibitory laws would be to attempt the legal suppression of human nature; which being impossible, such legislation must be absurd. There are great evils in the present management of the liquor-traffic, chiefly arising from the wholesale adulterations with poisonous drugs everywhere _largely_ practised, but most ruinously in the northern countries of Europe, in Canada, and in the United States. Were the traffic so taken in charge by governments or carefully-appointed companies that _pure liquors only_ should be furnished for consumption, all profits from the sale accruing to government, the great mass of the evils (now justly complained of) in connection with the liquor trade would disappear, while at the same time an immense revenue would accrue to the federal or State treasury, as the case might be. If these prohibitory laws were passed, and carried out in their spirit, dreadful evils would be the result; and, finally, such laws never can be carried out at all, and, by consequence, it is not competent for government to enact them. The whole matter of intemperance comes purely within the domain of morals; religion alone can deal with it radically; and while the civil law should and must punish drunkenness, with the crimes resulting therefrom, it is to Christianity alone that we must look for the effectual reformation of the drunkard and prevention of his sin. These are the arguments that present themselves to us against the enactment of what are called “prohibitory laws”; and we believe the suggestions above given, regarding the evils of the present liquor trade and the mode of ridding the world of those evils, to be in full consonance both with the facts and with common sense.