The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1884-02-22
HIGH LICENSE.

There are many people, and among them
not a few who at heart are sound temperance
people. who advocate what is now popularity
called High License" They do this not
because they are in favor of rumselling and
rumdrinking in any form, but because they
look upon the attainment of the high license
idea as practicable, and assume that the
attainment of prohibition is impracticable,
and they go upon the adage that g half loaf
is better than no bread"
We think that when these well-meaning but
mistaken people come to look more fully into
this position, they will abandon it on account
of its radical unsoundness.
1. It is unsound in the principle that I'M
derlies it, because itproposes to base refoanad-
torn legislation upon q compact NTH an I'M
moral business. It says to the iquor-seller.
we are opposed to the sale and use of alco-
holic liquors, but you may follow the bust
ness if you will pay enough for it.
But if it is harmful to community and
morally wrong to sell it under license for
which $40 is paid it is harmful to communi-
ty and morally wrong to sell it under license
for which $1,000 is paid. Nor will any
amount of money paid for the privilege of
selling it remove that harm, nor make the
selling of it right To accept of the high
license idea, therefore, is to accept of COM
pact with an immoral business for money
consideration This is the reason why the
temperance people of Ohio declined to &C.
cept it and refused to be grateful to the Re-
publican party and to vote with it when that
party adopted a high license law as a party
measure. They saw no essential difference
between high and low license, and of the
two evils very consistently chose neither, and
instead ran ticket of their own, which gave
no little umbrage to the high license politi-
Clans
g. We think the position of these people a
mistaken one in the assumption upon which
it proceeds, namely, that high license
wherever enacted will very greatly restrict
rumselling and the damage which results
from it.
But experience does not sustain this as
license or Scott law, as it is sometimes called,
went into effect in Ohio, DR.. Arson Smyth, of
Cleveland, wrote to the Evangelist as follows:
"Nearly all our drinking places have paid
the required high license and continue their
work of ruin In the ward in which reside
seventy-fve of the eighty dramshops have
paid the tax and continue the crime of de-
stroying happiness and running souls I have
never expected that it would decrease intern
perance to any extent"
What DR.. Arson Smyth thus describes as
true in Cleveland of the practical operations
of high license, was largely true of its opera
ton throughout Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois,
where it was tried, and would be the case
wherever it might be adopted. AS a revenue
measure it is doubtful if anything could be
adopted that would bring money into the
treasury faster, but as measure to suppress
drunkenness, and the evils which flow from
it, which is the object of temperance work, it
is not only failure but rather tends to in
crease the evil than to put stop to it. 1t is
an inevitable conclusion that if man pay
$1,000 for his license instead of 1925, he must
make up the 1915 in some way out of the
business And he will devise and operate
methods to gain the money that will be more
enticing and more damaging to the communi-
ty, however much more gilded may be the
trappings which he throws around those
ways.