good time when he is not. The function of the nervous system is to tell the truth. When it has been taught to lie, its worth as a guide to caution is permanently impaired. The joys of alcohol, nicotine, opium, or any other nerve-affecting drug belong to the fools' paradise. In the long run, sham emotions destroy as well as torture, "whether of love, religion, or liquor.”

The German word, auslösen, to loosen up, is well used by Mr. Heinemann to express the effects of alcohol. It dissolves or loosens up the restraints and reserves, the establishment of which in the individual is the main feature of character-building. Character is the power to say "no" when occasion requires. In conviviality, reserves are broken down, and no power or wit is stimulated. The Babel and babble of impulses which the sane man has under control are released. These are not stimulated, but set free. This explains why convivial men so enjoy each other's company, and why any degree of alcoholic enthusiasm is so painful to the man of sober mind. Surely the man who abstains totally from alcoholic drinks is safer than the moderate drinker. I think it equally certain, that, other things reasonably equal, he has greater joy in life than the man who seeks pleasure in unrealities which make for future depression.

But if the use of alcohol were confined to table use of beer and wines, with an occasional extra bottle in good company for refreshment or conviviality, the temperance movement would never have assumed its present militant character. The user of alcohol would fight out the question with his doctor or his employer, as is largely the case in southern Europe. But it must be remembered that the drunkards of the world-and Latin Europe is no exception are steadily recruited from the ranks of the moderate drinkers. The claim that no one becomes a drunkard who is not predestined to become such thru heredity, weakness, or hereditary appetite has no adequate foundation. There are a few such, foredoomed in a world crowded with useless and pernicious temptations, but for one of these there are a hundred who fall thru ignorance, goodfellowship, and the weakness of good nature. As well say that weaklings, with women and children, are bound to fall thru defective sidewalks, as an argument against safe walkways. The other line of attack centers on the saloon and the bar-room. Not a word would be raised in defense of these monstrous abuses, as they exist in Great Britain and America, were it not for the money which is behind them. The saloon exists for the beer and whiskey it can dispose of. The wine interests have little part in the bar-room. The more beer and whiskey is sold, the less wine. The grosser evils attached to wine are mostly those of club-room and the "French Restaurant." The beer is the weakest of alcoholic beverages, but it is the most abused, the work of the bar-keeper being to make it lead up to the stronger drinks. A glass of beer in good company is nobody's business. To force three quarts of beer on a boy in one night becomes a social question. When that is done (and this is no

exaggeration of the experience of the vomiting youth who get their first experience of manhood in some saloon of the Brewers' Association) it is no wonder that the community arises to extirpate the public nuisance. In the prohibition movement of today, the business man is more prominent than the preacher, the employer of men more active than the "temperance crank," and the movement, based on economic necessities, has come to stay. Νο one save the brewers can save the saloon. They can save it only by making it innocuous. If it is made harmless, it will not bring in revenue. Το destroy the financial motive in it constitutes a just way of selling alcoholic beverages. This is the motive of the Scandinavian system, which takes from the dealer all interest in the amount sold. But if official graft be brought into the matter, as seems to have been the case in the dispensaries of South Carolina, we have only substituted one evil for another.

In the saloon of today, as largely owned and managed by the Brewers' Associations, we have:

1. A center of drunkenness and dissipation.

2. Around this cluster other vices, as gambling and lewdness.

3. The bartenders are not men of average integrity.

4. The system is worked to the contamination of local politics. In the country, such saloons fall to the level of the uncontrolled "road-house." In the city there are many degrees, but the lowest and most common is "the dive."

5. The drinking-place in every land is the open door to the brothel, the center of the red plague the two most offensive and dangerous diseases known to modern society.

In England the condition is much the same, but rendered worse by the presence of the "barmaid," and by the recognition by the government that liquor-dealing in all its phases is a legitimate profession, which is not the case in America. The agitation, reasonable or unreasonable, against the liquor business does not in any degree excuse the brewers who own these places from reforming them. They can clean them up with a word if they wish to. No one else can do it. They can make them law-abiding, and, what is better, urge more stringent laws. It is all in their hands. They can, if they choose, maintain establishments which sell beer and wine only, without the more dangerous and wholly poisonous distilled liquors. If there is any reform possible, no one places obstacles in the way of its acceptance by the brewery interests; but any reform would mean a reduced output and reduced profits, and no one, so far as I know, is in the beer or whiskey business for his health.

The relation of drink to poverty, crime, and venereal disease cannot be stated in a single paragraph. In America and Europe, a large part of the crime is instigated or aggravated by strong drink, and, accident excepted, there is not much poverty associated with temperate living. Excessive use of alcoholics is at once a cause, an effect, and a symptom of personal decay, of the progress of weakening of will with mental and moral ineffectiveness.

The comparison of excessive drinking with gluttony and with the undue use of proteid food has but little pertinence. The use of alcoholic beverages is for the sake of the effect of a specific substance contained in them. This substance is a poison in itself, and poisonous if used in large amounts. It also creates a specific thirst to be assuaged only by the substance which creates the thirst. Gluttony is a result of ignorance or stupidity, and its ill effects are largely physical, more or less temporary, and vary with the substances concerned. No one eats an excess of beefsteak for the uric acid it may contain, nor for the decaying residuum which may poison the colon. Nor is there any authority for ascribing any tangible amount of poverty and crime to over-eating. In general, a glutton uses an excess of alcohol with his other excesses.

The claim that prohibition does not prohibit in the dry states has not much value.

In the first place, "dry" districts are surrounded by "wet" ones, and smuggling, legal or otherwise, is an easy process. Maine, for example, is full in summer of saturates and semi-saturates who range its forests and throng the watering places. For their convenience, "blind pigs" exist in many places. Yet in cities, like Eastport, a young generation is growing up of boys who have never seen a saloon, and who have never been led along the graded course from weak drinks to strong, which our saloons supply. The "blind pig" is an evil from the standpoint of law, a gross and monstrous evil. Every unenforced statute breeds evil. But, from the standpoint of society, it is the lesser of the evils of drink. When the generation of hard drinkers has passed away, the "blind pig" follows. In Kansas, for example, there is a rising generation which feels no need of alcohol, and has no interest in saloons. No statute is going to prevent the hard drinker from finding his alcohol. The patent medicine serves his purpose, if other agencies fail.

The corrosion of the saloons is mainly felt in the years from sixteen to twenty-four. If boys under twenty-one were shut out from them, more than half their evils would be abated. Thousands on thousands of boys step from the salcon to the brothel-not a long step-to be poisoned for life with the most loathsome of diseases, the parasites-animals and plants, the red plague, of which no one was ever certainly cured; and worse, the gonorrhoea and syphilis transferred from the guilty to the innocent, the involving of sterility, disease, and ultimately utter misery. Not many men or boys thus throw away their future when they are sober. Commonsense, when a man is himself, generally controls both passion and curiosity. We hear sometimes of law-abiding saloons. It is even claimed that these are in the great majority. A saloon which is not law-abiding is simply a thug's nest, called in the city a "dive," in the country a "road-house." But a "law-abiding" saloon is little better. The law itself is saloon-made.

The law recognizes as the first purpose of the saloon that of making money. It allows money to be made, even if it be blood-money, coined from the sorrow and distress of women and children, the slaughter of boys, and the decay and disease of men.

It is true that wine-drinking Italy, beer-drinking Bavaria, and other regions where light alcoholics prevail, visible drunkenness is relatively rare. It is certainly true that in a region which offers light alcoholics only, and where these are not pushed hard under a get-rich-quick system, the people are more sober than in regions where whiskey, brandy, cognac, and absinthe are everywhere accessible. The absence of distilled liquors, not the prevalence of fermented liquors, is the real agency in temperance. In regions where children grow up without knowledge of alcohol, you will find a still better record. But there are few regions which have been "dry" for a generation, and commercial interests force alcohol into every community and into almost every family, whether they will or not. Abstinence has never had a fair test in this matter. Meanwhile, we may freely admit that wine and beer are relatively innocuous, when they do not lead up directly to the stronger drinks. When they do, even in Latin America, the results are no better than in whiskey-drinking regions. The effects of brandy on workmen in Paris is the motif of Zola's Assommoir. All forms of strong drink constitute a devourer-assommoir-whatever the country or race. The actual relation of wine to temperance in southern Europe has never been adequately studied. The problem is not a simple one, and the mere fact that there is less visible drunkenness where dilute alcohol is a daily beverage tells but a small part of the story. The daily partial saturation carries its burden on brain and kidneys and phagocytes (white corpuscles) while on the other hand the spasms of excess are relatively less common. This is a problem of physiology and pharmacology, as well as of social science, and the offhand answers usually given to it do not advance us very far. In general, we may admit that extreme statements on the side of abstinence have often done much harm to the cause of temperance. We may admit that obedience to "the rule of not too much" would take the sting out of the most denunciations of drink, and we may further admit the honesty and intelligence of those who differ from us in theory and in practice.

Yet, with all allowances, there is much hard, practical truth in these words, which Robert W. Chambers puts in the mouth of his honest physician. Addressing a young clubman, he says:

Alcohol is a poison, and it has not and never had in any guise the slightest compensating value for internal use. It isn't a food. It is a poison. It isn't an aid to digestion. It is a poison. It is not a life-saver. It is a life taker. It is a parasite, forger, thief, liar, brutalizer, murderer. There isn't and there never has been one word to say for it, or any excuse except morbid pre-disposition or self-inculcated inclination for swallowing it. You can take your choice.

THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION

HELEN MARSH WIXSON, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, DENVER, COLORADO

From the North, South, East, and West we have gathered here today in the mighty cause of Education, and from the West I bring you greeting. We claim many things for the West, but nothing greater than the courage of California, for great as was her disaster, great as was her loss, neither was equal to her spirit of courage. Before the fires of adversity had died down her people had taken up their burden, and today a new and beautiful San Francisco greets us. It is the spirit of the West, and in the dauntless West, in this place dedicated to higher education, we fearlessly lift our standard. Civilization, in traveling from ocean to ocean, passed "Liberty Enlightening the World," and much was made clear, and in that enlightenment we are taking undisputed our way down the path that leads to greater human advancement.

But the tie that binds us to the past should not be neglected, and there are times when it is well for us all to forsake the altars of today and take refuge in retrospect, and if we do so now we may hear the voice of Martin Luther singing, for that voice has not died out of human life. The sturdy form of Calvin, who gave to the English-speaking world the common school, will rise before us. The seventeenth century will fade with the Latin tongue losing a little of its exclusive prominence. The eighteenth will advance beyond the middle age, and the nineteenth will make of education a matter of general social interest, and America will take her place and play her part, for we are a people whose forefathers were committed to the public-school system from the earliest day. Education with them was an exacting religious duty. We have struck on many a pedagogical rock since then, but we realize that the education of today springs from roots sunk deep into the soil of the past, which countless generations tilled and made fertile; and that this is an age of progress we owe to the fact that there has been progress from the beginning.

With the dawning of the nineteenth century there was an educational awakening. The fact that education was our chief industry, without which no commonwealth could prosper, became an accepted fact, and the great Pestalozzi went further and taught the world that education was the chief means by which the masses could be redeemed from degradation, misery, and vice. He also taught that a schoolroom should be a workshop as well as a classroom.

But the greatest lesson of the nineteenth century was that education is a universal right, and it is now not only a duty but a privilege to provide it for all.

There is no sentiment so dear to the American people as that of the Declaration of Independence, and no function of our government that is

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