for the punishment of prosecuting officers, justices of the peace and judges of municipal and police courts, in case of failure in their duty.  I am glad to be able to say that the judges of our higher courts have, from the first, been true to their duty in the administration of this law, as of all others.

In much the larger part of Maine, in all the rural districts, in the villages and smaller towns, the liquor traffic is absolutely unknown; no such thing as a liquor-shop exists there, either open 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 policy and of the men who favor it—­by an immense majority.  If it be conceded that the people of Maine possess an ordinary share of