CHAPTER XVII.

LICENSE A FAILURE AND A DISGRACE.


For over two hundred years in this country, and for 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