God!" Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing worse.

   At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a class, been content to obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth Amendment saddled upon us and no Volstead act to bridle us.

   In the final analysis, and stripping aside the lesser contributory causes, I maintain there were just two outstanding reasons why this country went dry after the fashion in which it did go dry: One reason was the Distiller; the other was the Brewer. And for the woes of either or both I, for one, decline to shed a single tear.

   How a fellow does run on when he gets on the subject which is uppermost in the minds of the American people this year! All I intended to say, when I started off on this tack, a few pages back, was that if I absolutely and completely cut out all alcoholic stimulant no doubt I should be reducing my weight much faster than is the case at this writing. To-day practically all the members in good standing of the Order of Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach—I mean the dietetic sharps—agree that he or she who is banting will be well-advised to drink not at all. For the most part they do not make a moral issue of this detail. Some of them refuse to concede that a teetotaler is necessarily healthier or happier or more useful to the world than the moderate imbiber is. They merely point out that whiskies and beers are, for the majority of humans, fattening things and should therefore be eliminated from the diet of those wishful to lose their superfluous adipose 

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