South Carolina Temperance Advocate

The Right to Prohibit.

If the Legislature has no right to enact a law prohibiting the traffic in intoxicating drinks, then what right has it to meddle with pauperism and crime? Is society limited to the cure of these evils and prevented from a prevention? Then it might as well give up the hopeless enterprise first as last-let the unfortunate and incompetent feed and clothe themselves as they can and the rogues run at large to satiate themselves with villainy. Personal liberty just as much requires the overthrow of all laws which prevent the mercenary from victimising and seducing the weak and unwary, as the Maine law. "If we yield the opponents of the Maine Law their sacred principle, we must establish the unrestricted right of tempting and being tempted as the arch-enemy would have it; and that being done, what revenue would long suffice for gilded palaces, and the expensive and tedious processes by which justice fills them? Common sense proclaims, like the voice of the infinite multitude of waters, that society has a divine right to relieve itself and slough off this whole business of swilling the human mind into fatuity by poisonous drink. Individual right against social power depends upon the nature of the thing to be done--the balance of the good and evil there is in it. Now, in this age of the world, as in none before, Alcoholic Beverages have undergone the scrutiny of science. The Psychologist, the Chemist, and the Physiologist, have traced the subtle spirit through all the nerves and fibres of the human frame, and noted nothing to compensate its inevitable mischiefs. The Political Economist and Statistician have watched the effect of this business on wealth, and found it every way destructive. The Theologian has weighed its result upon the soul, and found nothing but immeasurable woe. The good and the joy of it is like the momentary flash of the exploding magazine, which scatters black wreck and mangled corpses in all directions.