SECTION CCXXXVI.. Expediency of Sumptuary Laws.

EXPEDIENCY OF SUMPTUARY LAWS.

To judge of the salutariness of sumptuary laws, we must keep the above three social periods in view throughout. At the close of the first period, every law which restricts the excesses of the immediately succeeding age (the middle age) is useful because it promotes the noble luxury of the second period.[236-1] And so, in the third period, legislation may at least operate to drive the most immoral and most odious forms of vice under cover, and thus to diminish their contagious seduction. It is a matter of significance that, in Rome, the most estimable of the emperors always endeavored to restrict luxury.[236-2] But too much should not be expected of such laws. Intra animum medendum est; nos pudor in melius mutet.[236-3] It is at least necessary, that the example given in high places should lend its positive aid, as did that of Vespasian, for instance, who thus really opposed a certain barrier to the disastrous flood of Roman luxury.[236-4]

But a strong and flourishing nation has no need of such leading strings.[236-5] Where an excrescence has to be extirpated, the people can use the knife themselves. I need call attention only to the temperance societies of modern times (Boston, 1803), which spite of all their exaggeration[236-6] may have a very beneficial effect on the morally weak by the solemn nature of the pledge, and the control their members mutually exercise over one another. It is estimated that, of all who enter them, in the British Empire, at least 50 per cent. remain true to the pledge. In Ireland the government had endeavored for a long time to preserve the country from the ravages of alcohol by the imposition of the highest taxes and the severest penalties for smuggling. Every workman in an illegal distillery was transported for seven years, and every town in which such a one was found was subjected to a heavy fine. But all in vain. Only numberless acts of violence were now added to beastly drunkenness. On the other hand, the temperance societies of the country decreased the consumption of brandy between 1838 and 1842, from 12,296,000 gallons to 5,290,000 gallons. The excise on brandy decreased £750,000; but many other taxable articles yielded so much larger a revenue, that the aggregate government income there increased about £91,000.[236-7] [236-8] The Puritanical laws which some of the United States of North America have passed prohibiting all sales of spirituous liquors except for ecclesiastical, medical or chemical purposes, have been found impossible of enforcement.[236-9] [236-10]

Montesquieu's opinion that in monarchies luxury is necessary to preserve the difference of class but that in republics it is a cause of decline, is very peculiar. In the latter, therefore, luxury should be restricted in every way: agrarian laws should modify the too great difference in property and sumptuary laws restrain the too glaring manifestations of extravagance. (Esprit des Lois, VII, 4.) As an auxiliary to the history of sumptuary laws, compare Boxmann, De Legibus Romanorum sumptuarias, 1816. Sempere y Guarinos, Historia del Luxo y de las Leyes sumtuarias de Espana, II, 1788; Vertot, Sur l'Establissement des Lois somptuaires parmi les Français, in the Mémoires de l'Academie des Inscr., VI, 737 seq, besides the sections on the subject in Delamarre, Traité de la Police, 1772 ff.; Penning, De Luxu et Legibus sumtuariis, 1826. (Holland.)]