The report that any person has obtained a divorce for any cause but the most serious generally sends a shudder through any American social circle which calls itself respectable. Even husbands and wives whose own marital experiences have not been as joyous as was expected, are shocked by the legal disruption of a family—the spectacle of the wifeless husband whose wife really lives, or the woman without mate or protector whose husband nevertheless is not yet dead. But the force of the shock gradually weakens through frequent meetings with either party. The faults of the absent member are recalled, the good points of the alleged culprit are also recalled, and little by little excuses are made, until the change is regarded as coolly as the dissolution of a business copartnership. Unfortunately, too, the parties to a divorce are often brilliant members of the society in which they have moved, for the liveliest persons are generally the most discontented. The unrest of some phases of social life, the desire to be less confined at home, and to be more in general and congenial company, has a great deal to do with bringing about divorce, much though the guilty parties may deny it, and the persons who most frequently appear in the divorce courts are those who have been the most popular in their respective social sets.

This is bad enough, but it is only the beginning of the evil. What man has done man—or woman—may do, is as true of evil as of good. If Mr. A or Mrs. B has escaped a lot of apparent marital trouble by divorce, why should not Mr. and Mrs. C do likewise? They meant well—this is an admission which most people sooner or later make in favor of everybody not absolutely fiendish—they failed. Why should they not try again? Then besides, they once more have their freedom, and the longing to be free is strong enough in the animal portion of any one’s nature to rise and trample down everything else, if it is at all encouraged. Little by little, yet very rapidly, contemplation of the problem of divorce discourages efforts towards self-improvement and the perfection of marital life. It is a benumber and deadener of every honorable conjugal impulse. To endeavor to decide between two evils is an experience which is demoralizing to any one; to decide between evil and good, when the good seems no more desirable than the evil, is a great deal worse. Yet this is the mental and moral condition of every one still married who contemplates divorce as a possible release from relations which are unsatisfactory, yet which might be made all that they should be.

The effect of association with divorced people—and there is no grade of society which does not contain them—is especially deplorable upon young people of marriageable age. The veriest heathen who has studied the influences of marriage will admit that the rising generation needs greater seriousness in contemplating wedlock. But what can be expected of any good-natured, well-meaning, thoughtless, careless, pleasure-loving, selfish young man or girl—and nearly all young people are fairly described by these adjectives—who, while wondering whether or no to propose to, or accept, some attractive person of the opposite sex, is continually reminded by certain facts and incidents that if the bond becomes irksome it may be broken at will?

Some husbands and wives fight like cats and dogs, but in spite of it all, thank God, they still dearly love their children. What man or woman within the pale of decency would give a daughter in marriage with the thought that she might be put away by her husband at some time for some cause recognized by the courts of Utah, or Chicago, or Indiana, as sufficient for divorce? What parent will allow a son to mate with a girl who might possibly weary of him, release herself through legal measures and become the wife of some other man?

Physicians and spiritual directors agree that persistent thought upon the lower developments and interests of the marriage relation are extremely injurious to human character. What other phases of married life can be much dwelt upon by the mind of any one who thinks at all of the possibility of divorce for any cause but the most serious? The relationship thus regarded is so nearly that of the animals that love, so far as it has existed, must be brought down to the level of passion, and passion afterward to that of lust, and lust in turn down to appetite, until beings, who once had hopes and aspirations and longings which, in spite of being unfortified by knowledge and principle, were noble in themselves, place themselves practically on the level of the beasts. According to managers and chaplains of great prisons there is hope of reform for almost any criminal whose offences were committed only through what are called the selfish instincts, by which is generally meant destructiveness and theft. But these same experts in crime are utterly hopeless of the reformation of any one whose sexual instincts have become depraved or even inverted. Yet it is difficult for any one to go through a divorce case, or to think steadily upon the possibility of divorce, without such a deterioration of sexual feeling, impulse, and aspiration. What hope can there be that such persons will occupy a respectable position in society in the future?

Can divorce be made less popular and easy? Yes. How? By a constitutional amendment, against which no respectable citizen not a lawyer would dare to vote, that the national government shall make a divorce law to replace those of the States. Tricks of, and concessions to divorce lawyers cannot be slipped through Congress as easily as through a State Legislature. Congress is up to a great many dirty jobs, but not of that kind.

Congress can’t make a stringent divorce law, say some lawyers, but perhaps these gentlemen have their own reasons for saying so. Ex-Attorney-General Russell, of New York, who has looked into the subject closely, recently said such a constitutional amendment was possible, because more than two-thirds of the States already are inclined to limit divorce to the gravest cause only.

In the framing and adoption of such a constitutional amendment, Congress would have support from a source whose importance cannot be overestimated. I mean the Church; not any one denomination, but all—Mormons excepted. Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Church, said recently that his denomination could be counted upon to support such a movement; Bishop Whittaker, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, spoke in similar strain. The Catholic Church recognizes but one cause of divorce, and the Hebrews are equally rigid. Indeed, all creeds agree on this subject, and when the amendment comes up for vote or ratification the influence of such “Church Union” cannot be combatted—much less overcome.

The effect of a divorce law upon the community should be like that of a burned bridge to a lot of soldiers who have just crossed it. With no possibility of going back, there is every inducement to go ahead and make the best of whatever is before.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FARMER’S TROUBLES.

He generally comes to his profession by accident. He may not have meant to become a farmer, but through death, or change of family, or some other circumstance entirely out of his own control, he comes in possession of the family estates, almost certainly encumbered with mortgages, and must continue the family business to secure a living for himself. From the first he is doomed to loneliness, which is one of the worst curses that humanity can suffer. He cannot afford to employ help, for if he had capital he would not be a farmer, and it requires capital to secure proper assistance in the conduct of a farm. He must do all of his work himself. If he cannot do it, it must remain undone. As a rule the farmers of the United States are awake long before daylight in the morning, and their work continues long after dark in the evening. The working hours of the day, which to the

ordinary laborer are ten hours, and to more favored classes eight or seven, or even six, are to the farmer as a rule at least fourteen in twenty-four. His work is never done, any more than woman’s.

As a natural consequence he always is tired out. Custom and the demand of the markets restrict him generally to a single crop. Whether this be wheat, or corn, or oats, the seeding time is comparatively short. So is harvest time. The farm is larger than any one man or family can possibly manage, but American demand being at present only for raw materials, he has no choice. He must plant the staples from which foreign countries are willing to purchase the surplus for cash. Otherwise his condition would be worse than that of a slave. It is very hard for any one man to “break up” more than one acre of ground per day with a good team of horses. What, therefore, can the single-handed American farmer, who owns a hundred and sixty acres of ground, the customary “quarter section,” expect to do with his immense estate? To properly care for his family he should plant all of it; but, except in the case of wheat, if he were to plant it all, one-half to three-fourths of the crop would be wasted through lack of necessary cultivation. His horse is like himself, an overworked animal. In any section of the country the farmer is regarded safe who owns a pair of good horses. But animals working twenty-six days per month from sunrise to sunset in the long days of summer cannot be kept up to their work by any amount of feeding or care. Sooner or later one or the other of a span of horses may break down, and then the farmer is helpless unless he has money in hand with which to purchase a substitute. Not ten farmers thus fortunate can be found in any contiguous hundred.

For the farmer is always poor. If it were otherwise he would not be a farmer. A very little experience on the farm and less observation of men about him show him that there is more money in mechanical or mercantile business, to say nothing of other callings, than his own. But he is handicapped from the start, no matter if he begins young, and while he still is a bachelor. When he has a family on his hands he is simply helpless so far as the possibility of change goes. The average farmer lives in hopes that in time his children, of whom he generally has many, will be of some assistance to him. Frequently his hopes are apparently fulfilled for a short time. But children are not as steady as grown people. They roam about in any time which they have to themselves. They reach the villages. They learn of a life which contains less toil and more comforts than that to which they are accustomed, and one by one they begin to intimate a desire for a change. It is utterly out of nature for the farmer to disregard this desire. No matter how much he may love their company he knows in his inmost heart that a change from farm life to some sphere of activity which is less exacting would be a benefit to them physically and mentally, possibly morally also. His sons endeavor to become salesmen in stores, or to be clerks in lawyers’ offices, or solicitors for one business enterprise or another—anything to avoid the persistent and wearing drudgery of the farm. His daughters, in spite of the boasted independence of the farmer, and of his family, are very easily persuaded to go into any factory that there may be in the vicinity. It is not that they love home less, but they love companionship more, and, being like human beings everywhere else, they are keenly sensitive to the cheering influence of money—real cash received once a week instead of a possible balance to the family’s credit at the village store at the end of the year.

For the American farmer is generally at the mercy of the trader. The trader is as good as the average merchant, and is practically a merchant in all respects. He is generally the keeper of a general store at which the farmer during the year purchases everything which he may need for his family on an open account; with the understanding that when his crops are made they shall be turned over to the merchant, and a general balance struck. When there is a good year the result may be in favor of the farmer, but good years are not the rule in the United States, even though the country is, as is said, the garden of the world. People who work and strain their energies to the uttermost require more in the way of ordinary creature comforts than those whose lives are more regular, and, though the farmer may discuss prices with great earnestness with the local merchant, the end is practically the same: he purchases whatever his family wants, so long as he can have it “charged.” He must purchase at the price stipulated by the merchant, for it is utterly impossible for him to look anywhere else for what he may need.

Some newspapers have made sensational complaints of the system of peonage to which some southern blacks or freedmen have been reduced by the storekeepers of plantations since slavery days, but there is no practical difference between their condition and that of the farmers the country over. “The borrower is servant to the lender,” and the man who has no money with which to purchase must submit to the exactions of whoever is willing to extend credit to him. Farmers’ notes are in the market in almost every county of the United States, and frequently those of which sell at the lowest prices are drawn by men of whose honesty of purpose and intention to pay no one has the slightest doubt. The only reason is that the farmer’s absolute necessities have been in excess of the cash value of his farm products.

It is customary to speak of the farmer’s life as being the happiest and the safest occupation in the world. Nearly every one knows of some one successful farmer, and bases his judgment upon his knowledge of that solitary individual. But facts are stubborn things, and they have been proved by figures in the United States in a manner that should make those who are envious of the farmer think again.

According to the last census report the average valuation of the farm-lands of the United States, including buildings, was less than twenty dollars per acre. The average value of the products was less than eight dollars per acre. A quarter section of land, which is the ordinary size of an American farm in the States most devoted to agriculture, is a hundred and sixty acres. The reader may cipher out his own inferences with very little trouble, remembering that groceries, medicines, clothing, and everything else not produced by the farm costs quite as much in the rural districts as in the large cities, and generally a great deal more.

It has been said that the gold produced in the mining districts of the United States has cost far more in labor and physical loss than its value amounted to. The cost of the farm-land in the United States leaves the apparent waste on gold in absolute insignificance. There are thousands of American farms to-day, probably hundreds of thousands, of which the land under the hammer would not bring as much money as the fences of those same farms have cost. The expense of clearing wooded land to fit it for agriculture has been far greater in almost every section of the country than the value of the land at the highest price prevailing would repay. The work of fencing and clearing was done by other generations, who got less from their farms than the present occupants are receiving.

One of the favorite arguments of men who urge younger men to go West and take a farm and grow up with the country is, that they will never lack for plenty to eat. This statement is entirely true. A man can always have plenty of food from his own estate if he cultivates it at all, or has any live stock. But one accompanying fact is, and this fact should be carefully considered—that frequently he has no place at which to market at a profit what he produces. He is so far from any market that what he does not eat he frequently is obliged to waste. Corn in the ear has been used during many winters for fuel in portions of the West, not because there was no wood to be had, but because there was no convenient place at which to market the corn, even at the bare expense of shelling and hauling to market, to say nothing of the previous cost of planting, cultivation, and harvesting. Where a farmer is near a market, as in some eastern States, his table is no better set than that of the cheapest-paid mechanic in the city. He may have eighty acres of wheat, but if his family wishes to eat a cabbage they are obliged to go to some village market and purchase it; the farmer himself has not had time to plant and cultivate it. Summer boarders find fewer vegetables in the country than in the city.

The natural question occurs, why does not the farmer change his business as hundreds of thousands of mechanics and other men are doing every year? The answer is that it is impossible for him to do so. He cannot leave his farm without ruin to his family, for to neglect to plant and cultivate is to lose the credit upon which in ninety-nine cases in a hundred he must subsist. He cannot sell his farm at auction under the hammer as if it were a city house or a village residence, for purchasers of farms are the rarest of all purchasers of real-estate in the United States. This is not in accordance with European precedent or supposition, but it has been demonstrated in every State, and almost every county of the Union.

Does all this mean that farming will not pay? No. Farming will pay if backed by capital as well as practical knowledge. But it is almost impossible that the American farmer of the present generation shall have any capital from any source whatever. Farming, when conducted intelligently, can be made profitable in any portion of the United States by a man with sufficient money in his pocket. Hiram Sibley, one of the most remarkable men whom the United States ever produced, was, at the time of his death, in 1888, managing four hundred different farms in nine different States of the Union, conducting all through correspondence, and he made it his boast, in which undoubtedly he was honest, that from each of these farms he secured a profit. But Sibley was a millionaire twenty times over, probably forty times. Whatever his farms needed they could have at once, and at the lowest market price, for he always had cash to pay for whatever he wanted. Nevertheless, this successful farmer, this millionaire, this thorough-going man of business, said, to the day of his death, that there was no more pitiable character in the United States than the farmer.

Nobody knows more about any one special business than the man who does not have to attend to its details, so there is a widespread opinion and assertion that the trouble with the farmer is that he is improvident. Men call attention to the expenses, apparently unnecessary, which he is continually making, particularly in the direction of comforts and even luxuries for his family. But what can the farmer do? Everywhere east of the Mississippi river he is near a village. His children go to school with those of the village. They learn of comforts and luxuries to which they are not accustomed at home. They talk about them. They think about them. They long for them. The farmer himself is a human being. Any one who mistakes him for a boor makes a terrible blunder. Whenever it is in his power to make his home more comfortable he does so with a degree of earnestness that is almost terrible. He is anxious to save himself from the possible imputation, by his own children, of being a less careful provider than any one with whom his family are on intimate terms.

When there comes a year in which crops promise well, the farmer will buy anything that his family may want, if he can pay by giving his note of hand, to fall due after the yield of the year is sold. Makers of sewing-machines, organs, pianos, venders of furniture and bric-a-brac, agents of subscription-books, go first and most steadily to the farmers with their wares. The farmer will give his note, the vender will find some one who will discount it, and in the end it must be paid or compromised. If the crops go well everything is paid—perhaps. If not, the farmer is deeper than ever in the morass of debt. He has the consolation, apparently slight, though it is great to him, that his family has enjoyed some of the benefits of villagers whom they have envied, and that some day, somehow, he will get even with the world for it. Perhaps this apparent extravagance of his will keep his family together longer than the family of his neighbor A or B or C, from which the boys have drifted into village stores and shops, and the girls into domestic service in the town, or perhaps into factories, all to avoid the hard work, but still more, the loneliness and barrenness of the average farmer’s home.

How helpless and unpromising is the present condition of the American farmer can best be imagined by a glance at the farming interest as it exists at present in the New England States. Here, within the lifetime of the present generation, mills have dotted the sides of every river and brook that has sufficient power to turn a wheel. Thousands of people are gathered closely together every few miles along these water-courses, working in mills and factories, and absolutely dependant upon the surrounding country for their food supplies. Yet in no other section of the country are there so many abandoned farms. A short time ago the twelve best farms in the State of Vermont were practically abandoned because it seemed impossible to their owners to work them without a loss, and a bill was introduced in the Legislature to exempt these particular farms—which, again I repeat, were the best in the State—to exempt these farms from taxation so that some one might be persuaded to work them. It is not that the farmers have no market for what they produce, but that the finer farm products, or what in the larger cities are called the products of market-gardening, are of a nature so perishable that the profitable promise of a good soil may be speedily lost by the loss of the field itself after gathering.

Even near the large city of New York, where some men pay the interest on land worth five thousand dollars per acre for the sake of tilling it for market-gardening purposes, there are thousands of acres of ground utterly neglected year after year, as they have been for the past twenty years. It is possible that some of these might have been tilled to profit, but, with a steady demand for labor in the cities for which sure and frequent pay is guaranteed, the farmer’s sons and daughters left their home, and the father was left without assistance and without means to hire help. Even had he hired it, the results would have been the same—the balance on the wrong side at the end of the year.

Frequently the suggestion is made that the farmers should receive a bounty from the Government or from his State on special products, and this system, so far as individual States are concerned, is in partial operation. The farmer himself is distinctly of the opinion that, while legislation provides special relief and assistance for nearly every other class in the industrial world, he should not be neglected. When he begins to demand such assistance, as he is now quite willing to do, there will be before the public a question of greater magnitude than any labor problem which has yet appeared. Special legislation has an unpopular sound, but the fact exists, as any follower of Congressional and legislative proceedings well knows.

The granger movement in the West was the initial of this attempt at improving the farmer’s condition. Like other great popular movements, it began with a sudden impulse, in which there was more earnestness than intelligence; yet any observer of the necessities of the farmer and the management of the railways knows that there was a substantial basis of sense to it. For a great many years the railways took the lion’s share of the farm’s yield, on the plea that it cost that proportion of the value of the crop to move corn or wheat or pork to market. Why it took so large an amount is well known in the case of many roads, which by watering their stock or subsidizing construction companies were capitalized at several times their value. In the future efforts of the farmer to secure recognition and proper compensation for his service, the factors of the problem may not be so distinct, but, unless something is done in the direction of legislative assistance, the farms of the West must in time be deserted as largely as those of the eastern States, in which there are now thousands of farms in which not only the land, but the buildings, are without occupants, and are at the service of anyone who may be fool enough to occupy them—that is the farmer’s way of putting it.

It has frequently been suggested that the farmer could save largely from the financial results of his year’s work by participating in co-operative movements for the supply of stores and other necessities of his family on his farm. It may not be known to theorists that this suggestion has nothing new in it. It occurred to the farmer in hundreds of counties, and he endeavored to act upon it. But what can a man do in the way of purchasing from first hands, who has no capital with which to purchase? Farmers’ stores and farmers’ clubs were tried, to a large extent, forty or fifty years ago, all over the States which now are the most populous section of the Mississippi valley. Sometimes the effort resulted in the establishment of depots of supply for farmers alone, but a single year of bad crops, whether caused by drought or insect pests or overflows, or any other cause entirely outside of the control of the farmer, would cause the ruin of any establishment which chanced to be started with capital sufficient only for a little while.

As before stated, and as must be kept in mind in each and in all considerations of the farmer’s lot and the farmer’s future, the agriculturist of the United States is almost always a man without capital, and a man whose constant struggle is to be equal by his output to his daily demands. When a farmer’s store failed, the deficiency had to be made up in cash, even if some of the backers had to sell their estates. Bankruptcy proceedings or “arrangements” with creditors were not easy. It is no exaggeration to say that it would be far easier, in most parts of the United States, to sell a white elephant or a million-dollar diamond than to turn a farm into cash at short notice, although the seller were willing to submit to a ruinous sacrifice. There are hundreds of thousands of farmers in the better and more fully settled States, who for years have had their estates in the market, and been willing and anxious to sell at a loss, yet have been utterly unable to find a purchaser, except among men of their own class, who had no money to pay in advance and who could simply offer a mortgage as security for future payment, and from which mortgage, in case of default on interest or principal, nothing could be obtained for a year or more, and even then only after proceedings most uncomfortable to institute and likely only to result in a terrible sacrifice to the creditor. The number of men who are “land poor” in the agricultural districts of the United States is almost beyond computation. The man who has a farm of two or three hundred acres, nominally valued at a hundred dollars per acre, is supposed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars and quite good for all his debts. The truth is that often he suffers more for lack of some small necessity for which cash must be paid than the city mechanic or laborer, who receives only a few dollars per week for his services.

Why doesn’t he borrow from a bank, giving a mortgage for security? Bless you, no bank that would lend to farmers, on the risks and time usually necessary, could continue in business.

The suggestion may be startling, but still it is practical, that it may yet be necessary, for the proper feeding of the community, that farming, like the policing of cities and the maintenance of an army and the conduct of the postal department, shall be done at the expense of the government. This seems to have been the method in Egypt in the days of Pharaoh and of Joseph, his steward, and America may yet have to revert to it. The Government will have either to manage the farms or assist the farmers; the people may choose which shall be done.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RUM POWER.

It is not necessary to recount the harm done individuals and families by the liquor traffic. Almost every charge that the most rabid prohibitionist makes can be substantiated by a thousand men who sell liquor, aside from what total abstainers may know or believe or imagine.

Bishop Warren, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, is not an excitable man, but he does not overstate the truth at all when he says: “Innumerable are the crimes of dolorous and accursed ages, and a fruitful source of them all is intemperance. It robs the body of its strength, the senses of their delicacy, the mind of its acuteness, the spirit of its life. It fires every passion, makes every base appetite the master of mind and will, leaves man an utter wreck. Of its work there are frightful statistics of robberies, arsons, murders, insanities, and curses to the third and fourth generations; but there are no statistics that can measure the heartbreaks of wives, hungers of children, disappointments of fond parents, and physical inheritance of deterioration and unconquerable appetite. It is the one great, stark, crying curse of our race and age. It is the personal foe of every parent, Sunday-school teacher, and preacher of righteousness.”

Miss Frances Willard, who is doing more successful temperance work than any man who is in the same field at present, states the case as earnestly as Bishop Warren, and with the extra force which figures always give—figures which no one contradicts because no one can. She says: “No man of the smallest intelligence can be ignorant of the fact that the saloon is to-day the chief destructive force in society; that the cumulative testimony of judge, jury, and executive officers of the law declares that fifty per cent. of the idiocy and lunacy, eighty per cent. of the crimes, and ninety per cent. of the pauperism come from strong drink; that the saloon holds the balance of power in almost every city of ten thousand inhabitants; that it is the curse of workingmen and the sworn foe of home.”

It isn’t necessary, either, to call attention to the harm done free institutions at election times by the influence of rum. The late “Petroleum” Nasby, whom all of us knew for a lovable fellow and an able editor, once consumed a gallon of whiskey a day on the average. When he stopped drinking he wrote a series of temperance editorials, concluding with the words “Paralyze the rum power.” “Pete” had been in politics himself: he knew what the “power” of rum was, and how it was used.

The demoralizing effect of plenty of liquor is so well known that the first duty of a local campaign manager, no matter of which party, is to make proper arrangements with rum-shops for supplying free drinks for the purpose of changing voters’ views. The man who has opinions, no matter what they may be, is quite likely to modify them if asked when he is under the influence of a few drinks; and if his liquid consolation is to be supplied at the expense of some other man, the opinions of the two are likely to be in entire accord before the transaction is concluded. Votes are easier purchased with rum than with money, no matter how large the sum that may be at the disposal of any political boss or ward committee. The public heard, a few years ago, to its horror, that an important State had been carried for the victorious party by a general distribution of new two-dollar bills. The truth is, as any one can learn by visiting the districts which then were close in the State alluded to, that a great deal more money than the entire number of two-dollar bills amounted to had previously been expended in rum-shops to which men who were willing to listen to what was called “a fair presentation of conflicting views” could be persuaded to come. Liquor is cheaper in the western States than in large cities. It is worse, too. A little of it goes a long way, and the man who will spend an evening in a rum-shop in a rural locality, is equal to any enormity, compared with which an apparent change of sentiment on political subjects is a mere trifle. As Channing used to say, “Rum outwits alike the teacher, the man of business, the patriot, and the legislator.”

Stepping aside from sentiment, and coming down to practical facts, Rev. Theodore Cuyler says that the liquor question “enters more immediately into the enrichment or the impoverishment of the national resources than any question of tariff or currency. More money is touched by the drink traffic and the effects of the traffic than by any other trade known among men. The tax upon national resources levied by the bottle is far heavier than the combined taxes for every object of public well-being.”

Statistics of drink are undoubtedly more appalling than those of the most bloody and senseless war that the world ever knew. Some that are published are entirely untrustworthy; a head for reform does not always mean a head for figures; so figures are often made to lie, like tombstones. But the truth is bad enough. It is plain to any man who knows anything about current values that the price of a glass of poor beer will buy a pound of good bread, and the price of a glass of best whiskey will buy a pound of the best meat. Yet a great deal more money goes for beer and whiskey than for bread and meat.

Why?

Depraved appetite, answers the professional moralist. This is the veriest nonsense, although it is the commonest of the reasons that are given for inordinate indulgence in stimulants. An appetite, properly speaking, must be of a fixed nature. There is no drunkard alive who has a fixed appetite for liquor. The depraved appetite, so-called, is an occasional manifestation of the influence of long indulgence in alcoholic stimulants, but it is no more possible to prolong it and make it a fixed condition of a man’s life than it is for a human being to make a voyage to the moon.

The first purpose of drink, to any one who is beginning to use liquor, is to “feel good,” and there is no denying that this is a general longing in every grade of humanity, from the highest to the lowest. Most human beings of the lower order are full of physical defects, all the way from those of the muscles and joints to those of the vital organs and nerves. If you ask the southern field-hand how he feels, you may safely bet that he will answer, “pooty porely,” and to get relief from his aches and pains he resorts to liquor, whenever he can get it. The Indian is another specimen of the man who wants to “feel good.” He is supposed to be physically a splendid child of nature, but he seldom is without some serious functional disorder or inherited curse of the flesh which makes him the willing slave of any stimulant he can get. A great host of unfortunates who have come to the United States from other lands are practically in the same condition; starved, abused, and underfed for generations and centuries, a glass of rum is to them like the touch of an angel, and a jugful is the equivalent of a heavenly host. There is no sense in talking about “depraved appetites” when you contemplate these people, from whom come the mass of the rumseller’s customers.

The second strong impulse to drink is like unto the first; it is to “brace up.” Human nature is either a dreadfully weak machine, or one which the majority persist in overworking. Men’s energies, spurred by their necessities, too often outrun their strength; then stimulation will be resorted to if it is at hand. It is quite true to say there is more strength, and stimulus too, in a loaf of bread or pound of meat than in a glass of liquor; but the food works slowly; the liquor works quickly. There are drinkers almost innumerable among the better classes, who use liquor medicinally, as literally as other men use quinine. Their liquor habit never is an indulgence; they would as lieve take some other stimulant were it equally convenient and effective, but they do not know of any; neither do their doctors.

When men feel the need of stimulation, yet dread the use of alcohol, they will search for help somewhere else. With the nominal decay of the rum influence in the United States some years ago, began the enormous sale of bitters, anodynes, narcotics, stimulants, nerve foods, brain foods, and other nostrums of similar purpose, with which the advertising columns of a great many newspapers, including most of the religious weeklies, were filled, as some are at the present time. In the city of New York, where there is one rum shop to every thirty families, it is not a common experience to smell opium or chloral in the breath of the man next you in church or street-car or business resort. But in the State of Maine, which has had more experience with close prohibition than all the other States of the Union combined, it is hard to go into any community of men without being made cognizant of the fact that resort to these stimulants is quite common in that virtuous State. I do not say this in contempt of Maine’s effort to get rid of liquor. The prohibition movement in Maine has done incalculable good in some directions. There is no other State in the Union in which young men have never been invited into bar-rooms, and do not know what public opportunity for drinking is.

Do I mean to say that alcoholic stimulants are absolute necessities of life? No; I do not, but—don’t underrate the meaning of that little word—but the majority of our voters do, and majorities rule in this country. There is altogether too much indulgence and drunkenness—too much yielding to the desire to “feel good.” The use of alcohol in large quantities has a bad effect upon the character and conduct of anyone; the temperance men will give you all the dreadful statistics you like as to the part rum plays in filling our jails, poorhouses and insane asylums, and God himself would shudder to tell us how many homes it ruins—how many widows and orphans it makes. On a division of the subject which is out of the province of statisticians, physicians will admit that more sexual immorality comes from rum than all other causes combined. There is no fear of overstating the aggregate bad effects of over-indulgence in liquor—it is beyond the power of words or figures to overstate it.

Having admitted that the curse of rum in the United States is quite as great as any moralist or prohibitionist has ever asserted, it follows that some remedy is necessary, and the question naturally occurs, What shall it be?

The almost unanimous reply will be, Control the demon by law. The majority of law-abiding citizens are quite willing to admit that this should be done, but the question arises and becomes more urgent year by year, What shall the law be? Shall it be in the direction of prohibition? The experience of several States, Maine no less than others, is overwhelmingly to the effect that prohibition does not prohibit. Perhaps not as much liquor is consumed in Maine as if there were open bars in every town. But anyone who is fond of a glass knows by experience that it is quite as easy to gratify his tastes in the State of Maine as it is in the city of New York. Worse still, the stranger going from another State to Maine, if he has any acquaintances at all in the prohibition State, is so importuned by hospitable souls, who wish to make him feel entirely at home, and as comfortable as he might be if he were in his native city or village, and has set before him liquors in such variety, that he generally goes to bed with a heavier head and awakes in the morning with a harder headache than if he had been in the worst rum-cursed portion of the country.

Have I heard the arguments in favor of prohibition? Well, can anyone help having heard them? No project ever placed before the public has been more earnestly and persistently advocated. But where is the sense of demanding a law against which you know the majority of the people will be arrayed? Suppose during momentary enthusiasm a State carries a prohibition law by a small majority, some drinking men themselves being constrained by their neighbors to vote for the law and against their own inclinations, how is the law to be maintained? By public opinion. Who creates public opinion? The majority. But the majority drink, and will continue to do so for some generations to come, unless all signs fail. Every State has a law against bribery and corruption of voters. Is bribery or corruption less common than before the law passed? No; it becomes worse year by year. Why? Because public opinion dare not and will not support the law. Personal interest, expressed in party feeling, winks at its violation—not all the while, but merely every time there is anything to be gained by it.

Both sides of the prohibition question were well put in a recent conversation between a prominent prohibitionist and Bishop Foss, of the Methodist Church, who has worked industriously for years to decrease the rum influence, but believes restriction is the only means practical. “Bishop,” said the prohibitionist, “if you saw a rattlesnake in the street, biting people and destroying human lives, would you kill it, or try to pen it up?” The bishop replied, “If I had been chasing it up and down the street for thirty years, trying to kill it but never succeeding in doing anything but make it uglier, I would consider myself lucky if I had a chance to pen it up.”

Then should law take the form of restriction? Yes; but immediately the law-makers discover in the words of some satirist of the past generation, that a great many men can be found in favor of a certain provision in law, who are against its enforcement by any method that is suggested in the form of a bill before any Legislature or Congress. A restrictive measure immediately affects a great many business interests. Moralists would like the sale of liquor restricted. Well, so would a great many liquor dealers. If a poll were taken of the wholesale dealers in liquors in the United States, regardless of section or environment, it would be overwhelmingly in favor of limiting the number of rum-shops, and compelling the sale of only the better class of goods. Perhaps the wholesale dealers are not philanthropists, but their work is in the direction of philanthrophy in the respect that they make more money on old and well-refined liquors, and consequently would prefer that nothing else should be sold.

Restriction can be attained in no other way except through license laws, and upon these at once the entire public agree to disagree. A license law that would regulate the traffic in a large city would be utterly destructive of the entire retail liquor interests of the country districts. Consequently the country dealers, through their representatives in Legislatures, protest strongly against any such enactment as the famous Scott bill, which was of such great service in restricting the liquor trade in the State of Ohio. The license exacted from a retailer in a large city would consume the entire profit of a country dealer, even if he were the only one in his town. City prices and country prices are different. It may be also stated upon undoubted authority, for the information of prohibitionists and other gentlemen who have never looked into the practical details of the liquor trade for themselves, that the countryman’s drink compares with that of the city man about as a full bath-tub does to a basin of water.

After restriction, and lowest, though not least important, among the list of reformatory measures, comes the principle of regulation. Can the liquor trade be regulated? Should it be regulated in the interest of morality and the public safety? Yes. We regulate everything else—absolutely everything—that affects the safety of humanity. We stipulate by law or special license where dynamite factories shall be located, how dynamite shall be transported, where it shall be stored, how it shall be sold, and every other stage of the trade in this dangerous yet useful article of commerce. We regulate the trade in gunpowder; there are very few States in which any minor is allowed to purchase any quantity of gunpowder or any other explosive. We regulate the sales of poisonous medicines, no matter how useful they may be, forbidding the chemist to sell them except on a physician’s order, and we make him keep them specially classified, and label every package or bottle or box of them which he sells, and to record the name of the purchaser. We regulate even the speed of horses in large cities; although every man is supposed to be able to take his ease and pleasure with a horse and carriage if he can afford them or hire them, in all large communities it is required that he shall not drive at more than a certain pace. None of these regulations are regarded as abridgements of personal liberty. All of them are admitted to be necessary precautions for the good of the entire community.

Unfortunately the principal opposition to regulation, which is the easiest and most practicable method of reducing the dangers of the rum traffic, comes not from rum-drinkers themselves, but from those who never consume any liquor—I mean the prohibitionists. Their principle seems to be the old, big-hearted, but utterly impracticable one of “a whole loaf or none.” In a number of recent local and State elections, in which the regulation of the liquor traffic was concerned, the prohibitionists usually voted with the advocates of free rum, not that they love liquor or liquor dealers, but that unless they could have their own way they preferred to leave things as they were before. Their purpose, as nearly as it can be discovered, was that the more fearful condition society could be brought to by the free use of rum, the sooner would society protest strongly against it and take “the only true view,” this being the prohibitionist’s modest way of putting his own opinion. The Russian Nihilists, whom everybody detests, work on the same principle;—things can’t be better until they have first been as bad as they can.

The present influence of rum in the United States upon morals, manners, society, and politics, must be charged upon those who have labored most earnestly to lessen it. Again I allude to the prohibitionists. They have discouraged every practical effort to abate the evils of the use of liquor. They have regarded all restrictive or regulative measures about as Mr. Garrison once regarded the Constitution of the United States in its relations to slavery—as a compact with the devil. The time must come when it will be not only unfashionable but indecorous and degrading for any man to use liquor, except in cases of sickness; but when that time comes the people will owe no thanks whatever to those who have talked most against the influence of rum. Once more, and for the last time, I allude to the prohibitionists.

CHAPTER X.

NATIONAL DEFENCE.

Ever since the late civil war ended the general of the army has annually given us earnest and intelligent warning as to the incomplete state of our fortifications, and the inability of our artillery for offensive and defensive operations against the improved armaments with which other nations have amply supplied themselves. The admiral of the navy has made similar reports. For a little while this looked like unnecessary precaution or what a distinguished Congressman once called old woman’s fussiness. Hadn’t we just triumphed over the largest armies that had been brought into the field, except by ourselves, in half a century? Hadn’t we organized a navy out of nothing, armed it splendidly, and done with it whatever was desirable that the naval power of the country should attempt? To be sure, our forts were few, but so were our harbors. The construction of some of the harbor forts in the United States was admired by the engineers of all the other civilized powers only thirty years ago, and the public knew of it. To afterward be told that these splendid and expensive structures were of no use, that they were inadequate, that two or three guns on a second or third-rate ship of some second or third-rate naval power could knock them to pieces would have been humiliating had it not been enraging.

Attempts were made from time to time, in the earlier years following the close of the war, to keep our military and naval establishment in fine condition. We had admirable staff departments, and large “plants” for the manufacture of almost everything required in ordnance and ammunition. We had the nucleus of a navy and army from which a peace establishment unequalled by any on the face of the earth might have been selected. But we let it all go. No such spectacle as the disbandment and disappearance of the great armies of the North and South was ever before seen, and historians have glorified in this. Soldiers, however, whose opinions we may yet be called upon to respect, regarded the spectacle in entirely a different light. We had once before been caught—by England—napping in a most unexpected way, said these old fellows; we paid dearly for our neglect; but now we are repeating exactly the same blunder. Excellent men who