[Footnote 1:  Mugler v.  Kansas, 123 U. S, 623.]

The most valuable of all police legislation is, of course, that to protect public health and safety; and prominent in the legislation of the last twenty years are the laws to secure pure and wholesome food and drugs.  Possibly “wholesome” is saying too much, for our legislative intelligence has not yet arrived at an understanding of the danger from cold storage or imperfectly canned food, though Canada and other English colonies have already legislated on the subject, to say nothing of our tariff war with Germany on the point.  One may guess that ninety-nine per cent. of the present food of the American people, leaving out the farmers themselves, is of meat of animals which have been dead many months, If not years, and from vegetables which date at least many months back.  It is nonsense to suppose that such food is equally wholesome with fresh food, or that there is not considerable risk of acute poisoning or a permanent impairment of the digestive system.  Senator Stewart, of Nevada, has shown that nearly fifty per cent. of the soldiers of the Spanish War had permanent digestive trouble, as against less than three per cent. in the Civil War, which took place before cold-storage food was known, or canned food largely in use.  It was hopeless for the States to act until there was Federal legislation on the subject, as the health authorities had no constitutional power over goods imported from other States; but the passage, under Roosevelt, of a national food and drugs act has given a great impetus to the reform, and by this writing more than half the States have passed pure-food laws, being usually, as they obviously should be, an exact copy of the Federal Act.  Among the articles specially mentioned in such legislation we find candy, vinegar, meat, fertilizers, milk, butter, spices, sugar, cotton seed, formaldehyde, insecticide, and general provisions against adulteration, false coloring, the use of colors and preservatives, etc.

Going from matters merely unwholesome to actual poisons, the course of legislation on intoxicating liquors is too familiar to the reader to make it necessary to more than refer to it, with the general observation that in the North and East the tendency has been toward high licensing or careful regulation, always with local option; while in the West originally, and now in the South, the tendency is to absolute “State-wide” prohibition and even to express this principle in the constitution.  How much this extreme measure is based on the racial question, in the South at least, is a matter of some debate; and the working of such laws everywhere from Maine to Georgia, of considerably more.  One may hazard the guess that the wealthier classes have no difficulty in getting their liquor through interstate commerce, while the more disreputable classes succeed in getting it surreptitiously.  Prohibition, therefore, if effective at all, is probably