WORKING OF PROHIBITORY LIQUOR LAW.

Thames Star, Volume IIII, Issue 1714, 1 July 1874, Page 2

WORKING OF PROHIBITORY LIQUOR LAW.

j.TJie following advertisement, reproduced from the Liverpool Financial .Reformer of Ist February, 1874, recently appeared in the Northern Whig, Belfast :— rt Another Challenge to the Permissive Billites. —The Prohibitory Liquor Law of Massachusetts.—Mr Martin Griffin, .one of the State Police Commission for the enforcement of this law, and who is said to have been most earnest in his efforts to enforce it, has resigned his post, under the conviction that its enforcement is impossible. In his letter of resignation to the Governor of Massachusets, he says he is fully convinced that the Prohibitory Law, as it stands on the statute-book, is detrimental to the cause of temperance, and leads to corruption and inefficiency ; that it is the business of the. brewers which chiefly suffers from the law, whilst the sale of spirituous liquors it almost unrestrained; and that this accounts for the surprising increase of drunkenness in Boston and other large towns.- To the same effect General Bates, chairman of the Police Commission, has published a letter in which he vigorously defends the the board, but says it has not power to cope with the violators of the law. The Boston Advertiser says that after nearly twenty years' Experience of prohibitory law, and seven or eight years' trial of a State Police, both have failed to do their appointed work in the cities; that thero are in Boston 3000 places in which liquor is illegally sold; that the public and open violation of the law increases every year ; aad if the police force we;e increased tenfold it could not be prevented. The Boston Advertiser describes the law as an anomaly opposed to the sentiment of the community; says that its daily and hourly violation has taken from it every atom of living 1 force ; and that a strong effort is to be made at the approaching session of the Massachusetts Legislature to effect a change in the prohibitory system."