a first lien on the premises occupied. The dealer is civilly liable for loss and damage resulting from the intoxication of any person to whom he may have sold or given any intoxicating liquor, and this liability extends to the owner of the premises. The guardian or any near relative may enjoin the sale of liquor to any individual. The law provides also for local option as to prohibition.
Statistics indicate some decrease of drunkenness in public since the law has been in effect. The law has not taken the saloon out of municipal politics, although there has been in ten years only one election of State officers in which the liquor question is thought to have affected the result. The dealers are impatient of any restrictions, and are constantly working against a strict enforcement of them. That against selling on Sunday is especially irksome to them. In Cincinnati the police declare it to be impossible to close the saloons on that day. The dealers are arrested, but juries can not be got to render verdicts of guilty. Public opinion is not behind the Sunday-closing law.
No recent attempt of any State to solve the liquor problem has attracted so much attention from the rest of the country as the dispensary system of South Carolina. It has become conspicuous from the vigor with which it has been enforced by Governor Tillman, who suggested it, and the resistance that has been offered to this enforcement rather than from novelty in the plan itself, for its chief feature is simply the town and city liquor agency of Maine adopted from Athens, Ga., where it had been tried with success. The dispensary law provides for one dispenser at the county seat of each county, and permits county boards of control to establish dispensaries in other towns. There is a State commissioner who buys the liquors, and is required to give a preference to distillers and brewers in the State. Every package of liquor must be sealed and bear a certificate that it was bought by the commissioner; a package shall not contain less than a half pint nor more than five gallons. The local dispenser shall not break the seal of any package; he must sell by the package only, and the purchaser shall not open a package on the premises.
The law effected a general closing of saloons throughout the State, but many unlicensed dramshops, called "blind tigers," took their place. At the time of the committee's investigation there were eighty-one dispensaries in operation. Buying the dispensary liquors from South Carolina distillers has led to the purchase of much liquor that was not sufficiently aged, and hence highly intoxicating. Many ardent prohibitionists denounce the participation of the State in the "unholy traffic." Well-digested statistics show an unmistakable decrease of drunkenness and disorder in the cities,
