PROHIBITORY LAWS NOT RELIGIOUS.
THE idea is quite prevalent that prohibition and religious legislation are necessarily connected; but nothing could be further from the truth. Prohibition laws can rightly be made and enforced only on the grounds that the liquor traffic is uncivil, that it invades the rights of American citizens, by rendering life and property unsafe. Liquor is the direct cause of more crime, pauperism, insanity, and misery than anything else. The State has no right to suppress the liquor traffic because liquor sellers are irreligious, but only because the traffic is the enemy of our homes, and endangers the liberties of the commonwealth. Horace Greeley, one of the strongest temperance men and prohibitionists of his day, was decidedly opposed to any religious legislation whatever. The view which this distinguished writer held on religious legislation is set forth in a comment on one of the early petitions to Congress in behalf of a religious amendment to the Constitution, a subject which is now being so generally agitated. In the New York Tribune of March 7, 1865, he said:— "We deny that this is a Christian nation. . . . The Federal Constitution is based on the idea that religious faith is purely a personal matter with which civil Governments have properly nothing to do, and with which they cannot meddle without doing far more harm than good." It is because such men with such sentiments have been those who have shaped this Government, that America has been so long the land of civil and religious liberty.