p. 57 | Damages To Be Paid

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 2, 1882

Damages To Be Paid.

The Chicago Tribune proposes, since most crimes are instigated by the use of intoxicating drinks, that licenses be put up to a price that will make a fund to pay the expenses of courts and prisons. But the Tribune fails to tell us why we should tolerate for a day a system which beyond all doubt does originate and foster most of the vice and crime of every city. Why continue it at all? If the loss it occasions is thirty times as much as the income from license, does it seem wise to license it? The Tribune's plan is to put the cost of license very high. But would not a higher license simply compel the doing of a larger business, so that the higher the fees the wider the ruin. The more expense the more sales, and the proportion between expenses and profits must be always about the same. We advise a shorter method, grant no more licenses, make no costs, and then we shall need no fund to pay them.

Mr. P. T. Barnum writes that in Bridgeport a liquor saloon depreciates adjoining property to the amount of $5,000. We may add that one saloon will also cause to disappear values among its customers to the amount of $5,000 annually. So that the average license fee does not nearly pay back to government a sum equal to the taxes it suppresses, to say nothing of the actual costs entailed by crime.

We protest against using money paid by honest temperance men to pay the cost of prosecution and other damages occasioned by the sale of liquors licensed or unlicensed. Give us laws that will define clearly the legitimate effects of drinking, and let the costs, be they less or more, be levied on the men who sell the liquors. When we give good material to a blacksmith or tailor or miller, and he ruins it, we can recover the value. We ought to be able to recover at least a percentage of the value of a boy from those who planned and compassed his ruin.

If we tolerate license at all, they should give bonds stronger than straw, to guarantee all such assessments. The fact that all saloons unite in ruining men, and that any one drinker usually obtains drink at many places, should bind them together as one man, when we fasten damages upon them. We should not object to grouping them by corporations or by counties in cases of damage.—Golden Censer.