that crime than a statute to the same effect. How, then, can it be expected that the recent adoption of a constitutional amendment in Maine is going to have any effect in the prevention of the sale of intoxicating liquors? Such sale has been forbidden in that State for more than thirty years. Prohibition has been the law of the State for all that time just as much as it will be now, and, if it has failed in the past to produce the result intended, so will it in the future.
I have said that offenses against the law are not of frequent occurrence, and of course that is to say in comparison with the ordinary events of life. Not one man in a hundred, probably, has even violated the provisions of the law as to the sale of intoxicating liquor. But violations of the law are more frequent in some communities than in others. The same law against murder prevails throughout the city of New York, for instance, but in certain parts of that city murder is of common occurrence when compared with other parts. The law forbids murder in all the Southern States, yet certain kinds of murder, by comparison with the Northern States, are of frequent occurrence there and go unpunished; and this is true to such an extent as to be an occasion of reproach to the condition of public sentiment there. Dueling was forbidden and punishable for many years before public sentiment was such as to permit the enforcement of the law. Now the statutes against dueling have become of little consequence, because public opinion about dueling is a sufficient law. Laws do not make people virtuous, honest, or temperate, by their mere passage. When laws punishing crime, fraud, and intemperance are enforced, they do have an influence in their prevention. But for the enforcement of the law we need not only persons ready to set prosecutions on foot and officers ready to serve warrants of arrest, but we need also courts and juries ready to convict on sufficient evidence, and witnesses willing to testify. For all these we must have an overwhelming public sentiment in favor of the law, and this is true not only of large communities like States and counties, but of small communities like villages and hamlets. Neither murder nor any other crime can be punished if those who have knowledge of the facts connected with it will not tell what they know. This is especially true of any class of crimes in which all the participants are held equally guilty; in illustration of which is the notorious difficulty of obtaining convictions for offenses against the laws as to the relations of the sexes. It is also true of offenses against the laws now under consideration, not because both parties to a sale of intoxicating liquor are held equally guilty, but because both are participants in the act which constitutes the offense, and all manly feeling, of which even drunkards have a little, revolts at testifying in such a case.
But even with public sentiment in favor of the enforcement of prohibitory laws, they have no such influence as persuasion and education. Another mistake made by temperance agitators, and one which follows
