such State a clause having in view the absolute prohibition of the liquor traffic? The next question in order is that of expediency, that is, admitting that State prohibition is right in principle, will its adoption redound to the best interests of the people at large? Will it tend to promote the welfare and general prosperity of our State morally, socially, or financially? Will it add to or detract from our material progress? Taking every thing together, will it be beneficial or detrimental to the material interests of the State? The opposition interposes the objection that such a law is sumptuary in its character and is an unwarranted interference with personal liberty. I have already discussed at sufficient length, I hope, the personal liberty part of the objection in the chapter devoted to local option and a repetition of the argument is not necessary. Is the objection maintainable on the ground that prohibitory laws are sumptuary in their character, and therefore contrary to the spirit of our American institutions ?

A sumptuary law is one that has for its object the regulation and restriction of personal expenses, and may refer to any character of luxury whatever which demands for its support a reckless or unnecessary expenditure of money. A sumptuary law may attempt to prescribe the amount of money you may appropriate to the support of your table and to regulate the costliness, or even texture, of your apparel. It may have for its object the establishment and forcible maintenance of a condition of entire social equality among all sorts and classes of people. It is easily to be seen that a law having such objects in view are not only wrong in principle, but hurtful and injurious in their operation. They are contrary to nature herself. In construing laws, whether they be organic or statutory, the object of the law-making power must be looked to rather than to the peculiar phraseology. They must be liberally, rather than literally or strictly construed, that they may accomplish the purposes for which they are enacted. If the object to be

And

attained is one falling within the purview of legislation, and in no way obnoxious to any constitutional limitation or restriction, the courts will go a long way to uphold it, although it may be defective in its language, and apparently harsh and oppressive in some cases. If the object of a law should satisfactorily appear to the courts to be sumptuary in its character, they would be justifiable in holding it inoperative and void. If the only object of a prohibitory enactment appears to be the regulation of personal expenses, and to reduce mankind to a state of perfect social equality, in spite of themselves, it ought to be ignored by the courts, and no man ought ever to suffer the penalties prescribed for its violation. right here is the distinction which many of the ablest men of our country have failed or refused to consider. They insist that if the State can legally and justly prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, it can, upon the same principle, prohibit you from eating bread and drinking coffee or from the enjoyment of any table or other comforts whatIt appears easily to be seen that the object of prohibitory legislation is not to interfere with individual profligacy, or to restrain in the least the natural desire to live well and dress decently and respectably. Its object is rather found to be precisely the opposite; that is, to aid and encourage all men in this laudable ambition: to remove from our fair State the greatest obstacle in the way of so many of our people in their efforts to attain them and be respectable and happy.

ever.

Nor is this the main object of such laws. The experience of mankind fully demonstrates, and no one will for a moment dispute it, that intoxicating liquor is descructive and dangerous to society at large; that while a man may be a gormandizer and fill himself up with unwholesome victuals; that while he may go continually dressed in the costliest "purple and fine linen," and yet not become vicious, blood-thirsty and dangerous, he can not fill up his stomach with "busthead,"

"tangle-foot," or any other kind of liquid malice aforethought, without becoming dangerous to society and oftentimes the terror of his best friends on earth, for whose lifeblood he becomes peculiarly thirsty. He becomes a raving madman, and often goes about "like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." When in that fearfully insane condition, he is apt to commit any crime whatever and most frequently satisfied with nothing less than murder. The wife of his bosom is not safe in his presence, his children hide from his terrible aspect, his best friends dare not approach him: he is crazy. He commits murder with apparent deliberation; he is restrained of his liberty and forced to become sober, when the knowledge of his awful deed first dawns upon his mind. He is afterwards put upon his trial for the offense; he proves by a number of creditable witnesses that he was wholly unconscious of the act; the law in its humanity says that a criminal intent is an essential ingredient in every offense and indispensable to legal conviction. The case is beyond the reach of penal statutes, no system of laws can be sustained on principles of common justice and humanity that provides for the punishment of an act committed by a person, while in a state of unconsciousness or insanity from whatever cause it may be produced, unless the act was previously contemplated and the insanity voluntarily brought about for the purpose of committing the offense and escaping the penalties through the medium of the plea of insanity. It is, indeed, strange how reasonable men can insist that the State can not legally protect her people from such dangers, that she must not interfere with a man', right to kill and destroy with impunity. How any man can justify the exercise of any force or restraint whatever in the prevention of crime or of injury, and at the same time contend that prohibition is unjust and oppressive and contrary to the spirit of our institutions, I am unable to understand or even surmise.

I can not understand by what right the State summarily puts a check on the importation and spread of infectious and contagious diseases through the means of quarantine orders and proclamations while she is to be handicapped by constitutional limitations which do not exist, and by that undefinable, intangible enemy of all legal restraint called personal liberty, we hear so much about, in her effort to check by law the spread of the deadliest contagion that ever infected human society. I frankly confess that I cannot understand it. Neither do I understand by what right and upon what principle the state can interfere with the sale of intoxicating liquors on the days set apart for popular elections, and how it is that the devotees of personal liberty do not rebel at the law requiring the saloons to be closed and their occupants to suspend business while the sovereigns are casting their ballots, if the right to traffic in whisky is so sacredly guaranteed by the spirit of our free institutions. By what right does the federal government prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquor to the indian? If their is a higher law in this land that overreaches the authority of the State to interfere with this business and that paralyzes her outstretched arm in the protection of her people, I want to know why this power has not been invoked in an effort to resist even the first feeble attempt she has made to lay positive restraints upon the traffic? It is not a question of how much the State may interfere, but as to her right to interfere in any manner or degree whatever, and if permitted at all, no limit can be fixed short of the absolute prohibition of the same, if necessary to the general welfare of the people at large.*

*Hon. D. B. Culberson, congressman from Texas, in his open letter to the Anti-Prohibition Committee expresses himself boldly as follows:

“I take great pleasure in making the statement that the democratic party is the devoted friend of the people. In this respect, indeed, it partakes largely of the personal characteristics of its founder, Mr. Jefferson. The party is thoroughly committed to that system of laws which secures to the

There is an ancient and oft quoted legal maxim which declares that the welfare of the people is the highest law: if this is the correct maxim, and we can see no objection to the principle it embraces, then it necessarily follows that there may be a law which is above constitutions. In the very spirit of this established legal proverb the people find the unquestionable right to revolutionize and overturn the government if its longer existence is subversive of the acknowl

citizen the largest liberty consistent with the welfare of the public. It regards government as a simple repository of right surrendered by the people upon trust, and esteems that government best which governs least. Influenced and inspired by such principles the democratic party has, from time to time, resisted the abridgement of personal liberty and rights when the same could be exercised and enjoyed without inflicting such evils upon the public as endangered good government and the general welfare of the people. You have been pleased to allude to the position of Mr. Jefferson upon sumptuary legislation. His position on that character of legislation is often used by the advocates of the liquor traffic against prohibition notwithstanding the fact that no law writer of his day and time classed prohibition with sumptuary legislation. It has been the labor of a later period to endeavor to extend the scope of sumptuary legislation, in order that the traffic in liquors, regardless of the public welfare, might be shielded from assault by the opinion of Mr. Jefferson. It may be said that had prohibition been submitted to the people of Virginia in his day and time, he would have voted against it, not upon the ground however, that the people did not possess the power and the right to protect themselves from an evil destructive of good order, but rather for the reason that the evils of the traffic had not then assumed such magnitude as to seriously endanger the welfare of the public. The question before the people of Texas involves existing conditions, not conditions which may have existed near a century ago. The evils of the liquor traffic, in Mr. Jefferson's time, pale into utter insignificance beside the monumental horrors that stalk through the land to-day hand-in-hand with this traffic. The feeble and insignificant power for harm exerted by the saloon in the earlier days of the republic has grown to be an overshadowing despotism. It assumes to control the franchise of freemen. It sets at defiance the laws enacted to preserve the good order of society. It enters the high and the low places of authority, and stamps its will over the will of the people. The wrecks of manhood which fill the land; the distress and bankruptcy wrought by its power; the onerous burdens of taxation imposed upon honest industry to defray the expenses of crime, the legitimate offspring of its influence, all show how deeply the public welfare is involved in the evils of the liquor traffic. For one, I believe the time has arrived when this despotism should be broken and overthrown, and the welfare of the people emancipated from its thraldom.