The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1902-07-02
THE KIND OF LIQUOR CODE.

The Middlebury Register follows
the Watchman and Journal in support
of the proposition that the entire bust
ness of buying and selling liquor and
regulating its use be directly taken in
hand by the State.
1t matters not by what name a sys-
tenn is known, or from what land the
system comes-from Sweden or Nor
way, or South Carolina or the canni-
bal islands. We took a system of vot-
ing from Australia, the land of kanga-
roos the countries or States in ques-
ton may have laws for regulating the
liquor traffic that may be good for in
vestigation or fruitful in suggestion,
but what Vermont wants is liquor
code as closely adapted to needs and
conditions existing within the State
as the best wisdom and virtue of her
citizens can frame. The code should
place the whole business of buying
and selling liquors, the entire man
agement of the traffic and use, in
the hands of the sovereign power.
The sovereign State can control the
traffic more effectively than the sub
iect towns or counties 1t can estab-
lish agencies, appoint or remove
agents, specify for what purposes liq-
uors shall be sold, how and to whom
they may be sold, and prepare and
visit penalties upon those who disre-
gard the law What is wanted is a
Vermont system of dealing with the
traffic, and to that end, i'll no narrow
or one-sided spirit, with no design to
encourage or make easy the sale of liq-
uors, but with a single purpose to
legislate for the highest welfare of all
the people, the risen and the rising and
the coming generations, in the State,
in the sight of God frame and enact a
law governing the traffic in liquors
and their use by this people.
The details of such a code may we'll
engage the attention of the best and
wisest men of the State. These are
the men who in every town or city
should be selected for Representa-
tives to the General Assembly, and
their calling and election should be
beyond peradventure. Otherwise
grave injury may come to the State
and its dearest interests
Respecting the principle of the law
which shall not be license-or To-
cal option law at all, permitting for
gain the unprincipled pandering to
the human appetite-the Register, re-
ferring to Mr.. Clement and his late
canvass, says:
And yet back of this grotesque hum.
bug of calling the right to an unre-
stricted sale of liquors a principle,
there is a principle in the question
which Mr.. Clement ambition has for.
ced to the front, principle which
has enrolled under its banner thou.
sands of earnest, upright, worthy men
the principle that law which inter.
fered unnecessarily and unwisely
with the liberties of the people, and
which because of these and other an.
noying conditions was and had been
for years most unequally enforced,
was not worthy to be upon our statute
books, and ought to be repealed This
is a very plain kind of a principle,
but principle we believe it is, and
we respect and honor those who feel
called upon to insist that this fact
should be recognized and the law
repealed.
And in the great struggle of the
future of our State for sobriety and
temperance, the Register counts as
much if not the most on the support
of these men, to sustain a Just and
practical law, which, with a united
public opinion back of it, can be OBJ.
served, and which will reduce the
long array of crime and suffering that
always follows their unrestricted sale,
to minimum, instead of raising
them, as high license certainly will do,
to maximum.
And this, to reduce the sale of liz.
uors to minimum, is all that we be,
lieve 1t Is an object to attempt, be.
cause al. that can practically be &C.
complished, and probably all that we
have right to attempt, for the use
of liquors is not necessarily an evil.
1t is the abuse of liquor that makes
the trouble, and therefore it is this ex,
cessive use which should be amenable
to laws which all, except possibly 6
few who want to make money by its
sale, will agree is a proper subject fol-
regulation, aud should be controlled
by legislation