Concrete examples may perhaps show more clearly than abstract statements the kind of difficulties that I am describing. Take, for example, the large class of proposals for limiting the sale of strong drink by such methods as local veto or Sunday closing of public-houses. One class of politicians take up the position of uncompromising opponents of the drink trade. They argue that strong drink is beyond all question in England the chief source of the misery, the vice, the degradation of the poor; that it not only directly ruins tens of thousands, body and soul, but also brings a mass of wretchedness that it is difficult to overrate on their innocent families; that the drunkard's craving for drink often reproduces itself as an hereditary disease in his children; and that a legislator can have no higher object and no plainer duty than by all available means to put down the chief obstacle to the moral and material well-being of the people. The principle of compulsion, as they truly say, is more and more pervading all departments of industry. It is idle to contend that the State which, while prohibiting other forms of Sunday trading, gives a special privilege to the most pernicious of all, has not the right to limit or to withdraw it, and the legislature which levies vast sums upon the whole community for the maintenance of the police as well as for poor-houses, prisons and criminal administration, ought surely, in the interests of the whole community, to do all that is in its power to suppress the main cause of pauperism, disorder and crime.