Good Health by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Nov 13, 1879

Good Health.

By Editor

Temperance.

SOME recent discussions concerning the effect of prohibitory temperance legislation in Maine have brought out a number of interesting statements concerning the prevalence of liquor-drinking in that state, in the "good old times" when the Maine Law was unknown. The Lewiston Journal, which is edited by an ex-governor of the State, sums up the matter by declaring that "the most prudent and cautious statistics show that there is not over one-tenth the amount of liquor consumed, inhabitant for inhabitant, that there was fifty years ago;" and that the places where the enforcement of the law is now most lax, are those which show the largest proportion of crime. A well-known writer declared that in his boyhood days in a Maine town, it was by no means an uncommon thing for drunken men to freeze to death on their way home; and he has put on record, in a striking paragraph, one of the means then used to return the frozen bodies to the "relatives and friends of the family."

In that town, he says, "a drunkard has been found across the river, frozen stark and stiff, with his bottle at his side. An icy rain had fallen before he was found, which, freezing as it fell, encased the body in a transparent armor of ice. He was brought to the church, and placed in the lower porch, upon a board supported by two benches, in order to be recognized. I saw him lying there, stark and stiff, like a statue of solid glass, his jug crystalized and grasped in his icy hand."

If the pen of a Victor Hugo or the pencil of a Dore had drawn this picture, it would have been thought wildly extravagant; but there it is, a real picture of life in a quiet New England town. That the exhibition of vitrified men no longer has a place in the ritual of the churches of the region is one of the changes which have been promoted, if not wrought, by restrictive legislation.

As ex-governor Dingley says, in the article from which we first quoted: "Prohibition supplements, just as the law against larceny supplements, moral forces. Neither suppresses altogether, but both restrain."

This seems to be a pretty general opinion in Maine itself, concerning the workings of prohibitory legislation within its borders; for both the State conventions of political parties have just declared against tampering with the existing law. And yet the statement will continue to be made, by persons who are not familiar with the facts in the case, that prohibitory legislation in Maine has broken down utterly.