Hon. William P. Fry, member of Congress from Maine, says:—

"Since the enactment of the prohibitory liquor law, the sales of liquor have fallen off more than two thirds. More than one half of the State is absolutely free from it, and the corner groceries' are gone forever.

"The jails in the three counties adjoining-Franklin, Oxford, and Somerset-have been tenantless for more than a year, and, I presume, the same is true of several other counties. In my own city, (Lewiston,) of 18,000 population now, and in Auburn, just across the river, of 10,000 more, not a hotel keeper, druggist, or grocer sells a drop of liquor. Of course with our large population liquor is sold in shanties, but it is a precarious business, for our warfare against the seller is constant and vigorous.” Hon. Lot M. Morrill, United States Senator from Maine, says of the prohibitory liquor law :

"I think it has been most efficient and salutary, as attested in the statistics of pauperism and crime. The number of persons supported at the public charge in 1870 was 4,607, as against 8,966 in 1860; and the statistics of crime, it is believed, would show about the same reduction."

NEW HAMPSHIRE. Hon. Justin Edwards, of the Supreme Court, says :—

"New Hampshire has a prohibitory law which needs to be better enforced."

VERMONT has, in addition to the prohibitory law, a Civil Damage act, adopted in 1869, which provides "that whenever any person in a state of intoxication shall wil

fully commit any injury upon the person or property of another individual; any person who by himself, his clerk or servant, shall have unlawfully sold or furnished any part of the liquor causing such intoxication, shall be liable to pay for all damage occasioned by the injury so done." The Legislature of 1876 enacted the following:

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"AN ACT TO ABATE AND SUPPRESS NUISANCES.

It is hereby enacted, etc. :

"SECTION 1. Every saloon, restaurant, grocery, cellar, shop, billiard-room, bar-room, and every drinking place or room used as a place of public resort, where spirituous or malt liquor or any kind of intoxicating drink is unlawfully sold, furnished, or given away, or kept for selling, or giving away unlawfully, shall be held and regarded as a common nuisance, kept in violation of law.

"SEC. 2. When, upon due trial, it shall be proved that any such liquor or intoxicating drink is kept for unlawful sale, furnishing, or giving away, or is unlawfully sold, furnished, or given away, in any such place of public resort as is named in the preceding section, the Court having jurisdiction in the case shall adjudge such place to be a common nuisance, and the same shall be shut up and abated by the order of such Court, in the manner and form hereinafter provided, and shall not be reopened by the person convicted as the keeper thereof until he shall file with such Court a bond, with sufficient surety or sureties, payable to the treasurer of the State, in the sum of not less than three hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars, conditioned that he will not thereafter keen unlawful sale hing, or giving away,

nor unlawfully sell, furnish, or give away, therein any such liquor or intoxicating drink as herein named. And if such person so convicted shall reopen or reoccupy such place before giving such bond, he shall be liable to a fine of ten dollars, payable to the State treasury, for each day in which he shall keep open such place before giving such bond, with the costs of prosecution.

"SEC. 3. Whenever any person is duly convicted of keeping and maintaining any such place or room used as a place of public resort, in which any such spirituous or malt liquor, or any kind of intoxicating drink, is unlawfully sold, furnished, or given away, or kept for unlawful sale, furnishing, or giving away, he shall be adjudged by the Court before which he is so convicted to be guilty of keeping and maintaining a common nuisance, and upon any conviction of such offense he shall forfeit and pay into the State treasury a fine of not less than twenty dollars nor more than two hundred dollars, or he shall be liable to a fine of not exceeding twenty dollars and imprisonment in the county jail not less than one month nor more than three months, in the discretion of the Court."

The bill then gives the forms necessary for the carrying out of the provision..

An amendment authorizes the arrest of intoxicated persons and detention till sober, and that the persons so detained shall upon oath disclose where the liquor was obtained, and on refusal may be committed to jail.

MASSACHUSETTS has been and still is one of the hotly, contested points along the temperance line of battle.

The City of Boston, so rich in Revolutionary traditions, so happy in its possession of the cradle of liberty, so full of "notions" and so prolific in reforms, has long been a chief seat of this beast of drunkenness, by which the power of both law and Gospel has been defied.

One of the first notable attempts to control this evil by means of legislation was the famous Fifteen Gallon law, so called from its prohibition of the sale of ardent spirits in less quantities than fifteen gallons, producing no small stir among the opponents of the temperance reform.

This appears to have been a scheme for serving the Lord with one hand and the devil with the other.

New England rum was one of the principal products of Massachusetts, as well as one of its most profitable articles of commerce, and this law seems to have been framed to prevent the sale of liquor in small quantities for tippling and drunkard-making, while at the same time the wholesale traffic in this commodity might go on. undisturbed. It was, also, thought that a man who could afford to buy fifteen gallons of liquor at one time, and take it home for use in his own family, would make a more judicious use thereof than the poor tippler, who could only afford to buy three cents' worth of liquor at a time.

This law was passed on the petition of a very large and honorable body of delegates to the convention which was held in Boston, February 20, 1808; but, after all their fine and pious rhetoric, it seems both pitiful and ridiculous that so lame and impotent a conclusion should have been reached, as to int only that when intoxi

cating liquors were sold, they should be sold in very large quantities.

Immediately on the passage of this law the liquor dealers met in Boston to contrive means to nullify its operation, and to prevent its being executed at all. They failed to procure its repeal for a considerable length of time; but, as may be imagined, the law which allowed wholesale and prohibited retail traffic in liquors could never accomplish very much in the way of moral reform.

The next year Mississippi enacted what was called the One Gallon law, which was evidently a stroke at the bar-rooms, but encouraged the consumption of liquor "in the bosom of the family." These laws, and all others like them, aiming at the regulation of the evils attendant on the use of ardent spirits, though they raised no small stir in their day, have passed into temperance history as miserable failures. Like all other compromises between might and right, they have only served to show how impossible it is to mingle fire and gunpowder, or to establish a fraternity between Christ and Belial.

In 1852 "The Maine Law," in its most stringent form, was enacted by the Massachusetts Legislature, and under its provisions large quantities of liquors were seized and poured out into the streets by temperance prosecutors, who, from their work as detectives, were nicknamed "Smelling Committees." But the defiance of the powerful liquor interest in Boston, where the law was never enforced, and the Yankee ingenuity which devised a variety of methods of evading it, made the law unpopular, and after a short trial it was suffered to become a dead letter.