This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ... PREFACE. It is a striking and significant fact that of all the reported cases, civil and criminal, arising under the laws regulating the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, a very large proportion have been decided within a recent period. Of the whole number of authorities cited in the following pages, fully one-half have been ruled within the last decade, and probably one-third within the last five years. Now the rate of growth and development of the case-law on any given branch, of the law, at least when it is as rapid and widespread as in the instance of the present subject, is a reliable indication of its increasing interest and importance. And this phenomenon cannot be fully accounted for, in the present case, by the intervention of any local or temporary causes. It points unmistakably to a general and growing determination to secure the enactment of effective measures for the suppression, as far as possible, of the evils of intemperance, and then to see to their full enforcement. Hence it is a safe prophecy that the number of actions, on both the civil and criminal side, founded on the laws in question, will not in the near future diminish. Again, the subject has passed beyond the point where its case-law might be described as rudimentary. In fact, the extant authorities have carried both the principles of interpretation and the rules of application to particular states of fact into such a degree of detail that the mass of precedents appears to exhibit a confusing and hopeless disorder, until marshalled in accordance with a rational plan of classification and treated as the authoritative expositions of a complex but consistent system of principles. For these reasons, the author has judged his present subject to be timely....