Here and there the wiles of the poison-mongers will undoubtedly succeed in evading the law, but their power for mischief will be diminished as that of the gambling-hell was diminished in Homburg and Baden,[8] where temptation was removed out of the track of the uninitiated till the host of victims dwindled away for want of recruits. Not the promptings of an innate passion, but the charm of artificial allurements is the gate by which ninety-nine out of a hundred drunkards have entered the road to ruin. It would be an understatement to say that the temptation of minors will be reduced a hundred fold wherever the total amount of sales has been reduced as much as five fold—a result which has been far exceeded, even under the present imperfect system of legal control. “In the course of my duty as an Internal Revenue officer,” says Superintendent Hamlin of Bangor, “I have become thoroughly acquainted with the state and extent of the liquor traffic in Maine, and I have no hesitation in saying that the beer trade is not more than one per cent. of what I remember it to have been, and the trade in distilled liquors is not more than ten per cent. of what it was formerly.” “I think I am justified in saying,” reports the Attorney-General, “that there is not an open bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor in this county” (Androscoggin, including the manufacturing district of Lewiston—once a very hotbed of the rum traffic). “In the city of Biddeford, a manufacturing place of 11,000 inhabitants, for a month at a time not a single arrest for drunkenness has been made or become necessary.” And from Augusta (the capital of the state): “If we were to say that the quantity of liquor sold here is not one-tenth as large as formerly, we think it would be within the truth; and the favorable effects of the change upon all the interests of the state are plainly seen everywhere.”