MERELY FOR REVENUE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Feb 28, 1906

MERELY FOR REVENUE.

A STATISTICIAN, who has made an exhaustive examination of a work entitled "Richardson's Messages and State Papers of the Presidents," finds that "while almost every other topic of finance, business, and politics has been treated by our distinguished line of Executives, and while the wrongs of every nation on the globe have been more or less fully recognized by them during the past 125 years, yet absolutely no reference ever has been made by any President to the question of temperance, prohibition, or the evils of the liquor traffic, as they vitally concern millions of our own people. Under the subject head, 'Distilled Liquors,' are about a dozen references, but instead of comment upon this topic from the point of view of its peril or importance as a moral issue, or economic evil, every instance is simply a reference to the collection of government taxes on the product in question."

President Roosevelt has come a little nearer the point in his last message to Congress, but it is a mere hint. He says:

I would urgently press upon the attention of the Congress the question whether some amendment of the internal revenue laws might not be of aid in prosecuting those malefactors known in the Indian country as "bootleggers," who are engaged at once in defrauding the United States treasury of taxes and, what is far more important, in debauching the Indians by carrying liquors illicitly into territory still completely under federal jurisdiction.

And, after all, the only difference between the "bootlegger" and other dealers who sell liquors in government territory is that one pays for the privilege, while the other does not. The government's label seems to be an antidote for alcoholic poison, in the estimation of the federal revenue laws.