Dr. Bowditch eighteen per cent for the State of Massachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of fifteen per cent. The total direct cost of the poisonvice (without including tobacco and other narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The indirect cost eludes computation, except under the three following heads: 1. The loss of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly earnings of a manufacturing community under the protection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, though several political economists compute it as equal to the direct cost. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefactions, reforms, and improvements prevented by the use of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth, if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison-vice at $1,055,000,000 a year-a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public libraries, our church property, school property, steamboats, bridges, and telegraphs taken together. (Appendix VI.)

Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant

vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legis lative measures whatever. For years to come twenty per cent of the aggregate would undoubtedly be devoured by liquor-venders finding means to elude the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent would be spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent more would probably be wasted for frivolous purposes-innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison-traffic, but still, on the whole, amounting to a loss of national resources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With $5,000,000,000 we could construct ten bridges over every one of our hundred largest rivers. We could build an international railroad of a gauge that would enable the denizens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics in twenty-four hours. We could realize Prof. Lexow's project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal railways connecting the centers of commerce with the suburban homes of the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attractive enough to drain the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the grop-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recreation; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnastics and zoological attractions for the summer season, and reading-rooms with picture galleries and musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country.

We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line our highways with shade-trees; we could plant foresttrees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a free public library. We could help the sick by teaching them to avoid the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime; we could teach our homeless vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cities. And, moreover, we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of a National Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and political economists, for the training of temperance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture - halls in every large city of the country.

Only thus could prohibition be brought to answer its whole purpose, for we should remember that the practical efficiency of all government laws depends on the consensus of the governed. Without the co-operation of the teacher, the mandates of the legislator fall short of their aim. But it is equally certain that in the field of social ethics the teacher can not dispense with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers can not much longer afford to ignore that truth, for the penalty of the neglect already amounts to the equivalent of the average yearly income of seven million working people. In the South a million men, women, and children of farm laborers earn less than $100,000,000 a year-i. e., $500 for every family of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of

the North they would earn less than $200,000,000. We can therefore again be wholly certain of not overstating the truth, if we assert that in the United States alone the poison-vice devours every year the aggregate earnings of more than fourteen hundred thousand families. In one-dollar bank-notes of the United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be pasted together into a paper strip that would reach up to the moon. Stacked up in bundles, they would form a paper pile a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and fifty feet high.

If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts could be employed for the benefit of the poor, it would almost realize the dreams of a Golden Age. But even if we could save it from the hands of the poison-vender by burning it on the public streets, all friends of mankind would hail the conflagration as the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of men. For its flames would save more human lives than the perpetual peace of the millennium; it would prevent more crimes than the civilization of all the savages that infest the prairies of our border states and the slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save us from evils for which mankind has thus far discovered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of blessings which human skill is unable to restore.

CHAPTER V.

ALCOHOLIC DRUGS.

"Reforms advance with or without such allies."-Kossuth.

UNTENABLE dogmas are often abandoned in practice before they are repealed in theory. The penal code of several European nations still contains statutes on witchcraft. Several States of the American Union have failed to abrogate the Blue-Laws of the eighteenth century, though no combination of bigots and Dogberrys could nowadays persuade an American jury to convict a man for doubting the predictions of St. Augustine, or keeping his Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. Our medical text-books, too, are still full of prescriptions which intelligent physicians have ceased to prescribe for the last thirty years. Drastic drugs of the more virulent kinds have gone out of fashion almost as completely as venesection. Doctors cease to prescribe them, partly because they can not induce their patients to follow or to appreciate the prescription, but partly also because they have begun to recognize the true significance of toxic stimulation. They have recognized the fact that a virulent drug can at best only force Nature to post