a much longer period
of time in Great Britain and some of the countries of Continental
Europe, attempts have been made to protect the people against the evils
of intemperance by restrictive liquor laws. But as these laws were
permissive and not prohibitory, the evil was not restrained. Nay, its
larger growth came as the natural consequence of such laws, for they not
only gave to a few men in every community the right to live and grow
rich by doing all in their power to increase the evil, but threw around
them the protection of the State; so leaving the people powerless in
their hands.

HISTORY OF LICENSE IN MASSACHUSETTS.

The history of all restrictive laws which have stopped short of absolute
prohibition, is a history of the saddest of failures, and shows that to
license an evil is to increase its power.

Judge Robert C. Pitman, in his "Alcohol and the State," an exceedingly
valuable discussion of the "Problem of Law as Applied to the Liquor
Traffic," gives an instructive history of the license laws of
Massachusetts from early colonial times down to the year 1877. The
experience of Massachusetts is that of every other community, State or
nation, which has sought to repress drunkenness and its attendant evils
by the enactment of license laws; and we ask the reader's earnest and
candid consideration of the facts we shall here present.

As early as 1636, an effort was made in the Old Colony to lessen
intemperance by the passage of a restrictive law, declaring "That none
be suffered to retail wine, strong water or beer, either within doors or
without, except in inns or victualing-houses allowed." That this law did
not lessen the evil of drunkenness is plain from the fact that, in 1646,
in the preamble to a new liquor law it was declared by the Massachusetts
colony that, "Forasmuch as drunkenness is a vice to be abhorred of all
nations, especially of those who hold out and profess the Gospel of
Christ, and seeing _any strict law will not prevail unless the cause be
taken away_, it is, therefore, ordered by this Court,"--What? Entire
prohibition of the sale of intoxicating drinks? No. Only, "That no
merchant, cooper or any other person whatever, shall, after the first
day of the first month, sell any wine under one-quarter of a cask,
neither by quart, gallon or any other measure, _but only such taverners
as are licensed to sell by the gallon_." And in order still further to
protect and encourage the publican in his T