The bases of the temperance reform: an exposition and appeal./ With replies to numerous objections. By Rev. Dawson Burns.

I40 Thle Suz)prcssioiz of tlie Liquor Traffic.
by the law of England. If it be asked on what grounds
the State is justified in annihilating these branches of
industry, it must be answered, that society may put down
what is dangerous to itself-salusfiob?ilz' siireiza lex. Any
trade, employment, or use of property detrimental to the
life, health, or order of the people is, by English law, a
public nuisance. And in suppressing it, the State assumes
the right of sacrificing private interests to the public
good. And this not only when the detriment is physical
or economical, but also when it is moral. Thus, unwholesome graveyards are shut up, and noisome vitriol-works pulled down, for their physical noxiousness; private coining is made illegal for economical
reasons; slave-trading, lotteries, cockpits, bear-gardens,
gamnbling-houses, brothels, and obscene prints are prohibited on moral grounds."* It now remains that
we see what reasons exist for the suppression of the
liquor traffic, arising from its effects upon the social
state.
I. Ifs iizflence in the Aroditction of intemierance is a fact
of the gravest szgn'jcance. The drinking-habit-whether
it shows itself in a frequent use of small quantities of
intoxicating liquor, or whether it assumes the form of
chronic besotment or raging inebriation-is an evil the
prevalence of which is a national calamity. Personal
character is damaged, fitness for the duties of life is
impaired, family resources are squandered, family education is neglected, and a decay, more or less rapid, of the
physical, mental, and moral faculties-in a word, of the
whole man-sets in, the arrest of which is always difficult
and, at certain stages, utterly impossible. Drinking is
both a disease and a vice, and, while cursing the victim in
his individual, domestic, and citizen relations, it deprives
society of much valuable service which, should lie even
* Fdinburg.~ Review, July, 1854.