and the Carolinas, she made a special tour of several Southern States for the purpose of collecting material for this volume. Her own vivid presentation of historical incidents, private diaries, and letters, is enhanced by illustrations from old paintings, daguerreotypes and rare photographs. While the material of fully one-half of the book may be found in other books, there are some chapters which throw novel and significant side-lights on the dramatic events of that period. The story is told from the standpoint of the women rather than the men. The chapters on "Buttons, Lovers, Oaths, and Prayers for the President," "New Fashions," "Tournaments and Starvation Parties," "Schoolmarms and Other Visitors," are of special interest. It would be a delight to quote some of the passages if space allowed. When Miss Avary gives up the role of chronicler and discusses lynching and race prejudice in the light of present day conditions, she is not so convincing or so sound. E. M.

LIFE AND LETTERS OF LAFCADIO HEARN. By Elizabeth Bisland. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. Two volumes.

An extended article based on this biography and on Hearn's collected works will appear in the April number of the QUARTERLY. Here it need only be said that the letters contained in this volume are inferior to none that have appeared during the past two decades. For the first time we have the record of a wonderfully romantic career-and, it may be said, of one of the masters of English prose.

HIGHWAYS AND Byways of the Mississippi Valley. By Clifton Johnson. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1906,-xiii., 287 pp.

Mr. Johnson has brought together in this volume a series of well written and most interesting sketches based on careful observation of the scenery and the life on the Mississippi from New Orleans to the head waters of the great river. The author is no parlor-car observer. He has been in the remote ways, has hunted alligators and fought mosquitoes, has talked with natives in their cabins, and taken part in their community life. The original dialects and the primitive customs of such people are

given with some of the power of the writer of fiction. The text is made all the more vivid by a large number of excellent illustrations. Some of the chapters are "Cotton Patch Life in Tennessee," "Travelling in Arkansaw," "The Place of a Vanished City," "On the Minnesota Prairies," "New Times and Old in Wisconsin," and, most interesting of all, that on "Mark Twain's Country."

The following books have been received and will be reviewed in the April number of the QUARTERLY:

PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. By Rudyard Kipling. Doubleday, Page & Co. SHAKSPERE AND THE ENGLISH STAGE. By Sidney Lee. Charles Scribner's Sons.

FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW. By A. C. Benson. G. P. Putnam's Sons. The Life of Robert E. Lee. By Henry E. Shepherd. The Neale Publishing Co.

JOHN SHERMAN. By Theodore E. Burton. Houghton, Mifflin & Com

pany.

LIBERTY, UNION AND DEMOCRACY. By Barrett Wendell. Charles Scrib

ner's Sons.

The

South Atlantic Quarterly.

The Political Treatment of the Drink Evil

BY JOSIAH WILLIAM BAILEY,

Chairman of the North Carolina Anti-Saloon League

I. EXTENT AND GRAVITY OF THE DRINK EVIL.

The most serious and extensive evil of our times in Europe and America is the drink evil-indulgence and over-indulgence in liquors that intoxicate. It is likewise the most difficult to treat, having proved so far indeed baffling. Its extent and gravity are universally recognized, but no statesman of the first order, so far as I know, has addressed himself to it; and, I think, for the reason that no satisfying and widely applicable political remedy for it-even for the civic phase of it-has been hit upon. Abraham Lincoln is frequently quoted as having said that "the next snarl" -next after slavery-"we've got to straighten out is the liquor question." But slavery was limited to one section, while the drink-habit is distributed throughout our country. In fact the two evils are in no particular alike. Slavery was superficial; it could be cut off. Drink is a personal habit; it cannot be got at so easily. Slavery could be extirpated by law; the drink evil is to a degree beyond the power of legislation. The sale and manufacture of liquors may be regulated, may even be prohibited; but it is another matter to stay the personal habits of millions.

The most conservative authority, the "Committee of Fifty," eminent men led by Seth Low, Charles Dudley Warner, Francis G. Peabody, Charles W. Eliot, and Washington Gladden, declared after ten years of investigation that drink is the direct cause of nearly fifty per cent. of crime and of twenty-five per cent. of poverty in the United States, and other authorities reasoning from extensive investigations-notably the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor

* See The Liquor Problem. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

in its 26th Report-attribute to this cause nearly half the cases of insanity. While our annual drink bill, for intoxicating liquors, amounts to one billion five hundred million dollars, a sum that would build several Panama Canals, a tax of more than $20.00 per capita on every inhabitant of the United States,* an infusion of injurious intoxicants that not only produces an army of millions of drunkards, whose death-list is 100,000 a year, but impairs the effectiveness of our industrial forces to an incalculable degree not to mention the vast undermining of moral sense.

Even these most conservative estimates convince one at a glance that here is a field for the greatest service, that here is an evil that demands the wisest and most devoted efforts, that here is opportunity to do a larger good than can be found in any other field, that here is a task and a danger commanding every citizen's attention. As Mr. Francis G. Peabody says in the introduction to "The Liquor Problem:" "The truth on this subject is so grave and portentous that it needs no exhortation to carry an appeal to the conscience and the will. . . . Facts so prodigious should silence the sectarian controversies which divide the advocates of temperance, and should summon all intelligent citizens to the realization of a common peril and a common responsibility."

In this article I shall undertake to discuss some of the political efforts to cope with the drink evil, to indicate from American experiments-of which there have been many-the only practical and wise political method of dealing with the liquor traffic, and, finally, to set down certain conclusions in general and certain others with special reference to the present North Carolina experiment, of the wisdom of which my study and experience have convinced me.

II. ONE HUNDred Years of AGITATION ANd Protest. The year 1908 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the first temperance organization in the United States. I take it that the reader is tolerably familiar with the diverse forms that the temperance movement has assumed these hundred years-societies, lodges, orders, political parties, total abstainers' leagues, inter

*See American Prohibition Year Book, 93 La Salle street, Chicago.

church (anti-saloon) leagues, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, etc.

One cannot complain that the drink evil has flourished because of popular indifference or for want of passionate opposition. No other two or three or ten evils have been the object of so many opposition movements, such widespread agitation or so passionate protest. Great orators have devoted their lives to the work of denunciation and warning; far-spreading organizations have swept the country; churches have flamed with indignant protest; the greatest petitions in history have been enrolled; four times a year all the Sunday schools that follow the almost universally accepted International Lessons have instructed their millions in the danger of drink; in a word, the American people have for a generation waged a ceaseless and uncurbed agitation on the subject.

Nevertheless the amount of intoxicating liquors consumed per capita in our country has constantly increased. I submit here some statistics, gathered from authentic records, that indicate the rate of this increase:

In 1776 the average amount of liquor drunk in one year throughout the colonies was fifty quarts per family. Thirty years later it had increased to 150 quarts per family.* In 1877 the annual consumption of intoxicating liquors was 8.33 gallons per capita-about 150 quarts. In 1887 the average was 13.99; in 1897 it was 16.22; in 1906 it was about 22 gallons per capita.t We are not to infer, however, that the warfare against drink has been vain. We do not know what depths it has saved us from. Moreover, in recent years the industrial companies have taken steps which increasingly make for the exclusion of the drinker from the industrial domain, more particularly from railroads. And, what is of more significance, outside of our larger cities drinking no longer receives the social approval that it once did. Bishop Potter's remark that the saloon is the workingman's club, is doubtless true in a measure of the greater centres of population; but in the rest of the country the saloon cannot claim so much. Neither the workingman nor the politician can afford to make a habit of loafing in saloons. There is a sensibility

*Munsey's Magazine, August, 1905. "The Story of Temperance." +American Prohibition Year Book.