St. Johnsbury Caledonian

Prohibition.

We have always favored legal prohibition, and in spite of the wretched botch that has been made of it by intriguing politicians and hot-headed advocates, who are ever ready to assume the "management" of any reform that may be before the public, we favor it still. We believe that the principle stands good in reason and in statute both, and doubt if there ever was a time when it was so needed as it is to-day in those villages and cities where the Reform Club movement has been working out salvation to the intemperate. For no man needs just the protection that legal prohibition, and, so far as we see, legal prohibition alone, can give him, so much as he who is striving to escape the terrible fascination of strong drink. Then it is that the opportunity of buying what his insatiable appetite craves is fraught with a peril to his soul. To banish the sight and smell of liquor from the streets; to shut up the drinking shops where he has been accustomed to resort; to put the ban of the law and penalty upon that which he is fighting, helps in his battle beyond what one who has not watched the conflict between the higher nature of a drunkard can imagine. To such a person thus placed, legal prohibition stands forth in a light in which the average politician has never contemplated it—the light of a God-send.
W. H. H. Murray.