EVIL CAN NOT BE REGULATED.
By G.
The fallacy of attempting to “regulate” evil of any kind has had many illustrations, but one of the latest is the result of trying to regulate the liquor traffic in South Carolina by means of the State Dispensary system. Under this law the State retains a monopoly of the business and its profits. The privilege is granted to counties and municipalities to maintain dispensaries on a share of profits. The official organ of the California W. C. T. U. gives this condensed report of a personal investigation by Mrs. Stevens, the national president of the union:— Mrs. Stevens adds her testimony to that of many others, proving that the dispensary is no help to temperance. She says: “We were in a town where ‘there has been a dispensary several years, and ‘because so much liquor is dispensed contrary to law, ‘the people have ceased to call it a dispensary, and ‘call it a tank.’” She speaks of the “success” of the dispensary in Athens, Georgia, the first in the country. The profits are so large that there is litigation between city and county as to the proper division, and churches are waking up and withdrawing fellowship from their members engaged in dispensaries. She found many who said that once they believed in the method, but experience had changed their minds. It is proved that the dispensary does not reduce drinking, the profits encourage greed; there is as much illicit selling; in fact, the business can not be made “respectable” or be “regulated.” All it has done for South Carolina was to stave off prohibition, which was over half the State when the law was passed. No method can possibly make a wrong principle produce anything but evil. It will be remembered that the dispensary, like the army canteen, was set in motion as a temperance measure. It was supported by men who really sympathized with the liquor traffic, which was losing ground through the advance of prohibition, and also by that deluded temperance element that imagines the regulation of evil to be possible, and always fears “extreme measures.” There is only one way to avoid the results of evil, and that is to root up the cause. G.