Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 57:227 (Jul 1900)
Article: Limiting Saloon Territory: The Minneapolis Plan
Author: Judson N. Cross

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 405

Limiting Saloon Territory: The Minneapolis Plan

Capt. Judson N. Cross

The word “license” is distasteful, when applied to the control and regulation of saloons, to a great many of the people of every community. It infers the granting of a permission, by public authority, to carry on a business recognized by all courts and law-making bodies as detrimental to any people. It would be better to call the municipal machinery for controlling the liquor traffic a “repressive tax law” or “ordinance,” and the license fee a “repressive tax,” which they really are. Yet it must not be forgotten that “license” is the legal and historic word which, for generations among English speakers, has been applied to the legal forms by which the traffic is controlled, regulated, and in a great measure restrained. It is the peg on which are hung all kinds of repressive measures. Sometimes these regulations are enacted directly by the legislature, and sometimes the power is delegated to the county, town, village, or city authorities, either in general laws, or in a special charter to the municipality. All English-speaking courts, in all times, have recognized the retail

BSac 57:227 (July 1900) p. 406

traffic in intoxicating liquors as a proper subject for police control and regulation, by the legislature or law-making power direct, or by delegation to municipalities.

When it is determined that, for the public good, any kind of business should be controlled and regulated by the state in the exercise of its police powers, it is the immemorial custom, and has been in all the Anglo-Saxon ages, to exercise that power through that “repressive tax and regulation” system known as “licensing” the business. There has grown up, through the generations, so voluminous a body of judicial decisions on the power to control, regulate, tax, and repress any business dangerous to the community, through the ancient system of granting licenses, for the very purpose of checking and repressing its evils, that it might be dangerous to try experiments with new legal systems. Now, a municipality, having a delegated power to license, control, and regulate the traffic, may append to a license any reasonable—that is the test— repressive regulation for the protection of its people, and a high repressive tax is one of them. Any regulation which the legislature appends, which is constitutional, is presumed to be reasonable. Any repressive regulation, imposed by a municipality through its by-law or ordinance-making power, must stand the test of reasonableness before the courts.

Prior to the spring municipal election in Minneapolis, in 1884, there had been what was generally termed a wide-open policy, in saloon regulation. For years the license fee...