or secret. The traffic lingers secretly only in the larger towns
and cities, where it leads a precarious and troubled life--only
among the lowest and vilest part of our foreign population. Nowhere
in the State is there any visible sign of this horrible trade. The
penalties of the law, as they now stand, are sufficient to
extinguish the traffic in all the small towns, and to drive it into
dens and dark corners in the larger towns. The people of Maine now
regard this trade as living, where it exists at all, only on the
misery and wretchedness of the community. They speak of it
everywhere, in the press, on the platform, and in legislative
halls, as the gigantic crime of crimes, and we mean to treat it as
such by the law.

For some years after the enactment of the law, it entered largely
into the politics of the State. Candidates were nominated by one
party or the other with reference to their proclivities for rum or
their hostility to it, and the people were determined in their
votes, one way or the other, by this consideration.

Now, the policy of prohibition, with penalties stringent enough to
be effective, has become as firmly settled in this State as that of
universal education or the vote by ballot. The Republican party, in
its annual conventions, during all these years, has affirmed,
unanimously, its "adhesion to prohibition and the vigorous
enforcement of laws to that end;" and the Democratic party, in its
annual convention of this year, rejected, by an immense majority,
and with enthusiastic cheers, a resolution, proposed from the
floor, in favor of "license."

The original Maine Law was enacted by a vote in the House of
eighty-six to forty, and in the Senate by eighteen to ten. There
have been several subsequent liquor laws, all in the direction of
greater stringency; and the Legislature of this year enacted an
additional law, with penalties much more stringent than any which
had preceded it, without a dissenting vote. No one can mistake the
significance of this fact; it was an unanimous affirmation of
adhesion to the policy of prohibition, after a steady trial of it
and experience of its results for more than a quarter of a century.
And, since that time, the people have passed upon it at the late
annual election by an approval of the