license, the board extended to the enforcement of the law in cases of violation. The Issue mentions particular instances in which the board has revoked hotel licenses purely on the merits of the cases and in opposition to strong local and political influences. Light is thrown upon the conditions in both states, under the prohibitory law and under the present system, by a comparison of the number of persons who pay special taxes to the United States government as wholesale and retail liquor dealers. The tax receipts of the United States internal revenue collectors are often loosely called United States licenses. They are not that, for the federal government does not license the liquor traffic, it taxes it. But liquor dealers stand in such awe of the federal authority that few of them venture to sell liquor without paying the United States tax. To avoid prosecution in the federal courts, they must be able to produce the internal revenue receipt. But in Vermont and New Hampshire and some other local option states, the mere possession of such a receipt is sufficient evidence that the person holding it is engaged in the sale of liquor. The luckless dealer is therefore between the devil and the deep sea. If he cannot show the receipt, he is subject to prosecution by the federal authorities; if he has such a receipt, he provides all the evidence necessary to convict him in the Here are very serious loopholes in the law. A community which wants to stop the liquor traffic within its borders may vote to do so by an overwhelming majority, but a distant board may nevertheless inflict liquor-selling hotels and liquorselling railroad restaurant keepers upon it. And in towns and cities which vote for license, the issue and the revocation of licenses, the selection of locations, the detection of violations, the discipline of offenders, these and all other details are under the control and at the caprice of the same distant board, totally removed from local influence, unrestrained by considerations of local welfare, and exercising its large discretion without review or appeal. It is clear that a board of License Commissioners composed of two robust members of one party and a pliant representative of another might become, through its absolute control of the liquor traffic, a dangerous political machine. If the board created by the New Hampshire law does not become such a machine, it will be because its members are of the incorruptible type. The security of the state depends upon their personal qualities, not on safeguards provided by the law. As a matter of fact, the evils which were apprehended from this feature of the law have not been realized up to the present time. The board has administered the law with such fidelity that, according to the New Hampshire Issue, the organ of the state Anti-Saloon League, the leaders of the no-license movement favor the principle 1902 1348 of state control, and would like to see it state courts. Using initial letters to designate retail and wholesale dealers in all kinds of liquor and in malt liquors respectively, the official returns show the number of persons in Vermont and New Hampshire paying special taxes in 1902 under the prohibitory law, and in 1904 under the local option law: VERMONT. R. L. D. W. L. D. 1904 1043 This comparison puts it beyond question that in both states more persons sold liquor under the prohibitory law than are now selling it under license. In Vermont, this difference is occasioned by the large number of persons paying taxes in the earlier year for the sale of malt liquors. Eliminating these, and considering only the taxes upon a general retail liquor business, it appears that there were eighteen fewer dealers carrying on this business in Vermont under prohibition than under license; but the change is so slight as to indicate that the prohibitory law did not impose a serious check upon the liquor traffic except in those communities which, of their own option, under the new law have shut out the saloons. Of the 240 dealers taxed in 1902 in Vermont, 84 were town agents; but the remaining 156 were carrying on an illegal business. In New Hampshire, the contrast is striking and significant. So far as conditions may be read in these returns, there were 276 more persons selling malt liquors at retail, and 305 more persons carrying on a general retail liquor business, in New Hampshire under the prohibitory law than there are now under the license law. But there is another test of the working of the two systems, namely, the convictions for intoxication. Here are some figures from Vermont, the comparison being made in each case between the twelve months from May, 1901, to April, 1902, under prohibition, and the twelve months from May, 1903, to April, 1904, under the present law: It will be observed that in every instance there has been an increase, and in most instances a considerable increase, in the convictions for intoxication under the present law. Comparing the totals, we find that convictions and commitments for intoxication have risen from 870 in the prohibitory year to 2432 in the license year. This is an appalling change for the worse; and it seems impossible to account for this threefold increase except on the theory that, whatever the number of persons engaged in the business under the two systems, the more open traffic has swollen the volume of intemperance. As might have been expected, the effect of these excesses is apparent in the vote of the towns at the second elections under the law, in March, 1904. The pendulum swung far out toward license in the first year. It swung back again at the next trial of public sentiment. The most remarkable change was in Rutland, where the transition from prohibition to license had resulted in a kind of orgy which, as shown by the above table, multiplied the convictions for intoxication nearly fivefold. Rutland city in 1903 voted for license by 1737 to 542. In 1904 it voted for no-license by 1211 to 1109. Changes scarcely less marked took place in most communities where the excesses under the new system had been greatest. Thus in Chittenden County the license majority was cut down from 2690 to 755; in Bennington County it was reduced from 1132 to 235; and in Rutland, Washington, and Franklin counties it was wiped out altogether. In 1903, 91 towns voted for license and 155 against it. In 1904 only 40 towns voted for license and 206 voted against it. In the aggregate vote in the state the license majority of 5151 in March, 1903, was changed to a no-license majority of 7071 at the elections in March, 1904. The following table shows arrests for drunkenness in four New Hampshire cities in twelve months under the old law, compared with arrests for the same cause in twelve months under the new: In these four cities drunkenness, tested by arrests, has more than doubled under the new order of things. But in Manchester and Portsmouth, two cities in which the former prohibitory law was tempered and practically abrogated under the socalled "Healy system" of local connivance at its violation, the number of arrests has dropped, in the former from 1121 to 953, and in the latter from 874 to 799. This indicates that, in cities where drastic liquor laws are repugnant to local sentiment, enforced license may be more promotive of sobriety than unenforced prohibition. The New Hampshire law, as originally drafted and reported to the legislature of 1903, gave the cities of the state no option, but condemned them permanently to license. Public sentiment compelled a remodeling of the measure so as to provide for a vote on the license question in the cities every fourth year, beginning with 1906. We shall have to wait nearly two years longer, therefore, to know whether any of the eleven cities which adopted license in 1903 are weary of it. But the towns voted for the second time November 8, 1904. The number of license towns was reduced from fifty-eight to forty-seven. Thirteen towns changed from no-license to license; twenty-four from license to no-license. But the actual change was more important than these figures indicate, for the towns which changed from "no" to "yes" are small places with an aggregate population of 9581, while the towns which changed from "yes" to "no" have a total population of 48,606. The actual result, therefore, is to make a net addition of about 39,000 to the population living under voluntary local prohibition. This hasty survey of conditions in the two states indicates that in neither has public sentiment yet crystallized into full approval of the change. The old system worked ill, but the new is not working well. The revulsion against state prohibition was so strong that even some of the smallest towns, with only a handful of voters-for example, Glastonbury and Norton in Vermont, the former casting only ten and the latter only twentytwo votes, and Dummer and Lincoln in New Hampshire, the one casting only twenty-four and the other forty-three votes —were swept away by it. But the force of this revolt has spent itself, as is shown by the diminished number of places voting for license. It is now local option which is on trial before the bar of public opinion. If it continues to make so bad a showing in Vermont, regarding increase of drunkenness, as is disclosed in the figures which have been quoted, it will scarcely maintain itself. If the referendum in that state were to be taken over again to-morrow, probably the result would be the reverse of what it was in 1903. But if the new system is given a fair trial, it may be found that the legalized liquor traffic can be restricted under it within extremely narrow limits, and that where public sentiment tolerates its existence, it will be able to regulate its excesses more effectively than was possible under a system which ignored local sentiment. In New Hampshire, the heavy license majority in the aggregate local option vote shows how irksome were the old restrictions. Conditions are as yet too unstable to admit of assured prediction, but there seems little doubt that, in that state at least, local option will be retained indefinitely, and that the efforts of opponents of the saloons will be directed chiefly toward extending the nolicense area, and from time to time strengthening the law at points where it is found defective. A BUNDLE OF OLD LETTERS1 (THE LELAND PAPERS) BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL I A THING has only to be said often enough, and most people will believe it. I suppose this is why we are ready to agree that the art of letter-writing perished with our great-grandfathers. But if letters then did lose their fine flavor, — which, remembering FitzGerald's, Stevenson's, and a few others, seems to me at least an open question, they still had to be written; and I sometimes think that, even today, more can be learned of a man from the letters he receives than from the things at which he laughs, once considered the test. name, Certainly, had I been a stranger to the Rye, - as I must continue to call my Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, whom I would scarcely recognize by any other - I could not have gone through the mass of correspondence he left to my care, and not have learned something of the way he worked, endlessly and tirelessly; of the wholesale enthusiasm with which he threw himself into his tasks and friendships and appreciations; of his readiness to squander his energy in helping other people. Nor could I have doubted that, in his time, he had been a great wanderer over the face of the earth. The very confusion in which I found the letters was eloquent of the constant work and frequent journeys, that left no time for their systematic arrangement. Some were tied together anyhow; others were neatly classified and labelled; at the end they were fastened, as they came, in his books of Memoranda. And the worst of it is, there are great gaps in the correspondence, long intervals with not a letter from anybody to account for them, as if in moments of despair wholesale destruction had seemed to him the only hope of order; or else, the chances of time and travel had saved him the trouble. Of his early student days in the Universities of Heidelberg and Paris, of his first journeys abroad, when he-like Story and Longfellow and Motley and Bancroft and how many others- was one of Mr. Henry James's "precursors," next to nothing has been spared. And yet, what value his impressions of German student life in their first freshness would have! What a document his story of the French Revolution of 1848, as he dashed it off in the heat of the moment to a friend, would be!-the story told while he still quivered with those adventures of battle and barricade which remained forever after so vivid in his memory that, as late as 1890, being then in his sixty-seventh year, he was writing in his Memoranda, under the date February 24: "On Feb. 24th, 1848, forty-two years ago, at this hour I was in the thick of the French Revolution-at the Tuileries. Even now the memory inspires me. What a day it was for me! felt and knew its greatness at the time. I felt that everything in which I took part was history. 'Shot and smoke and sabre stroke and death shots following fast.' . . . Now I am high and dry on the beach. But I remember when I rolled in the waves." Of the period of storm and stress at home, from 1848 to 1869, when he was lawyer, author, journalist, editor, soldier, politician, when he wrote his Meister Karl, first translated Heine, and sprang into fame as Hans Breitmann, the letters are almost as silent. It is like the playful perversity of fate that the only two I 1 Copyright, 1905, by ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL. 309 have so far discovered should present an absurd, contrast, and should have no bearing whatever upon his public career, though they reveal much to anybody with the clue. For one, from Lowell, written during the year the first of the Civil War spent by the Rye in Boston, makes it clear that already his literary work opened to him the then most exclusive doors of the literary world; while the other, from Max Strakosch, eight years later, proves as plainly that his critical work on the press passed him behind the scenes of musical and theatrical life. This letter of Lowell's may be slight compared to the endless pages he wrote to his more intimate friends. But its careful preservation, enclosed in the little old-fashioned envelope with the long superseded stamp and securely fastened in a volume of the Poems, the literary relic in its appropriate shrine, - shows, I think, how much it was prized by the Rye, and is also suggestive of the attitude of the "younger men" of that day toward Lowell. It is pleasant to add, as a sort of parenthesis, that this attitude, in the case of the Rye, was not weakened by years. When Lowell was sent from Madrid to London in 1880, Dr. Holmes wrote to him, "Leland (Hans Breitmann), who has been living in London some years, says you will be the most popular American Minister we have ever sent," a prophecy that, in its fulfilment, did no small credit to the powers of the prophet. "Our Club," referred to in Lowell's letter, is, of course, the Saturday Club; - that the society he met there was on the whole better than any England provided, was his estimate of it even in 1883, when he had had a fair chance for comparison. The "notice," whether of the Poems or of the Biglow Papers it is impossible now to tell, has vanished, as the most flattering notices will, once they have served their turn in review or paper. The letter is dated 1861, and is from Elmwood, "the place I love best," Lowell described it to his old friend Charles F. Briggs that very same year. "It is only too flattering," he begins abruptly. "I thought our Club did not meet Christmas week, or I should have been there and claimed you as my guest. Let me engage you now for the last Saturday in the month. I shall call upon you the first time I come to Boston, which will be next Saturday. I have a vacation before long, and then I shall hope to see more of you. "I was infinitely diverted by your extracts from the Ballad and shall be greatly obliged for a copy of the whole. "With many thanks, Cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL. P. S. I mean it is the notice of J. R. L. that is too flattering. I know not what else to say - except that I am pleased for all that. I send my beso la mano to the author with many thanks." With this, another note from Lowell was preserved as carefully in the same volume, where both have lain undisturbed now for almost a half century. The second is not to the Rye, however, but to give his address to Professor Child, a businesslike hasty little scribble of a few lines, but with one personal touch in the "dear Ciarli" at the beginning, that would mean a great deal, I fancy, to all who are left of a certain group of Boston scholars. As for the letter from Max Strakosch, it has survived most likely because it was never delivered. It is to Maurice Strakosch in Paris, introducing the Rye, then starting on his second wanderings abroad, and describing him, with the eye to the main chance and the genuine good nature that are apparently part of the stock in trade of the profession, as "a very wealthy man and very highly educated," the defender of Miss Kellogg from the stupid attacks of "Bohemian papers,”—in a word, a man to be brought into society, any favor to whom "will do me good.” Whether the Paris society into which Maurice Strakosch could bring him was just the kind for which the Rye was eager, is another matter. But, anyway, he says, |