North America, England, Sweden and Norway, France, Belgium,
Holland, and Switzerland have applied remedies against drunkenness
(to the length of a State monopoly of drink in Switzerland); but
with too much zeal for public revenue, and, under the pretext of
public health, almost exclusively framed with a view to duties on
manufacture, distribution, and consumption. Yet these duties are
quite inadequate by themselves, and may even tend to the injury of
the physical and moral health of the nation, the increase of
price, leading to frauds and adulteration.
Penal laws against drunkenness, naturally resorted to in all
countries, are far from being effectual. There is so far no
system of direct and indirect measures against alcoholism, duly
co-ordinated, beyond taxation and punishment. And we perceive, as
for instance in France, in spite of the repressive law introduced
by my distinguished friend Senator Roussel (January, 1873), and in
spite of the extremely high duties, which were doubled in 1872 and
1880, that alcoholism persists with a terrible and fatal increase.
So it is, more or less, in every country still, in spite of duties
and punishments.
The irregularity of wages, and the deceitful vigour imparted by
the first recourse to alcohol, the poverty and excessive toil of
the working classes, insufficiency of food, inherited habits, and
the lack of efficacious preventive measures, are influences which
prevent the working man from resisting this scourge; and no fiscal
or repressive law, acting solely by direct compulsion, will ever
be able to paralyse these natural tendencies, which can only be
weakened by indirect measures.
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