science." I was made to take care of my own body and mind, and not another man. But "be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess." But this laying down of the law for others-this enforcing by penalty--this drilling of men into morality-is what I object to. And I cannot help saying that this straining of the obvious meaning of passages to meet the requirements of a foregone conclusion, cannot but prove very damaging to the minds of those who employ it. The further, too, they proceed, the more they get entangled in a deeper thicket of difficulties, from which they vainly try to escape. Christ and Paul, and human rights and human nature, confront them at every turn of their embarrassed course, and command them to reconsider the premises from which start. Paul knew that wine made men drunkards, just as meat makes them gluttons, and yet his command was not, don't use, but don't use in excess.' Anything beyond this by legislative enactment is simply folly, and wherever attempted will prove so, too.

Again, says FIDELIS, 'Premises Nos. 5, 6, and 7 are of Mr. Ailen's criticism, not of my article.' And yet she had said (CANADIAN MONTHLY of April, p. 369): Sweden, having tried her Gothenburg system for more than ten years in some parts of her dominions, is now, encouraged by the success which seems to have attended it there, endeavouring to extend its operation throughout the kingdom.' But when I showed that the consumption of spirits in Gothenburg had risen in ten years from 66,000 gallons to 329,000 gallons,' and that, by the testimony of the English Consul there, Mr. Duff, the system had proved a failure,' I am told that the premises are of Mr. Allen's criticism, not of FIDELIS's article.' But this is of little consequence.

Again, says FIDELIS, Premise No. 8, also, the writer [FIDELIS] is compelled to disavow.' I had there said that to prove Prohibition she would have to admit that the Mohammedan system, which puts at once a strait waistcoat on the will, far transcends the Christian, which leaves the will free to use, but not to abuse.' Of course, I was speaking of the one point at issue, Prohibition. Now, the command of Mohammed, thou shalt not use, was in no other sense legislative than the command of Christ, thou shalt not abuse; and it is for us,

looking at the whole nature and circumstances of the creature addressed, to say which system, in this respect—that of an absolutely prohibitive Maine liquor law, or one in which the use is sanctioned by precept and example, but the abuse denounced as a fearful crime -is the better system. The friends of Prohibition would not dare to say that they think the Mohammedan system the best; but remove the offensive word, and, flounder as they will, they do say it. But

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Again, says FIDELIS, Premises 9th and 10th must be equally disavowed, at least,' &c. And yet they are a necessary corollary from her doctrine. But I had lived too long under a so-called paternal government not to feel how the iron heel of despotism, under the name of Paternality, could crush out the very soul of a people, and, absorbing to itself the whole substance of liberty, leave to the governed little else than the empty name. I am therefore jealous of all encroachment on the liberty of the individual, and of all interferences with our natural rights. Such are simply usurpations, whether the usurper be a despot or a number of despots calling itself a majority, or the State.

My 11th premise is met by an appeal to the many philanthropic institutions of the day of an almost universally recognised useful character. I had thought it questionable if 'natural selection-the survival of the fittest-ought to be cheated in its operation by a universal artificial system of preserving the constitutionally weak, to propagate their weakness and uncontrol, instead of endeavouring-by appeals to reason, to the sense of right, to the affections, to self-interest-to rouse the sluggish will and invigorate self-control; and, thus, constituting this the test of their improvability and of their title to survive.'

This I said, not so much because it belonged to my direct argument, but because I thought that sympathy towards and interest in the weak, the drunken, and the uncontrolled, was leading us to overlook some very grave and momentous processes of Nature for the improvement of man, in which (to use the words of FIDELIS) 'the relentless forces of Nature which cry væ victis and drive the weakest to the

wall,' are eventually destined to work out the highest good to the race; and that if her whole course were to be reversed and her penalties, through artificial intervention, set at defiance by a universal systematized course of things by which the best would be mulcted in the interest of the worst, it might be found, in the long run, that Nature-old, hard, and heartless stepdame as she may be-blundered in her moral ends far less than we. For has she not nursed us through the thousand ages of our savage infancy, and by selecting the strongest traits and rejecting the weakest, taught us by many a hard and stern, but wise, lesson, to become what we are to-day, in this transition period of our nonage? And what may she not have in store for us in the future if we submit to her laws.

But I must introduce the reader to one of the master-builders of the world, who 'builds for aye.' 'If any one denies,' says Mr. Herbert Spencer, 'that children bear likenesses to their progenitors in character and capacity—if he holds that men whose parents and grandparents were habitual criminals, have tendencies as good as those of men whose parents and grandparents were industrious and upright, he may consistently hold that it matters not from what families in society the successive generations descend. He may think it just as well, if the most active, and capable, and prudent, and conscientious people die without issue; while many children are left by the reckless and dishonest. But whoever does not espouse so insane a proposition, must admit that social arrangements which retard the multiplication of the socially-best, and facilitate the multiplication of the mentally worst, must be extremely injurious.

'For if the unworthy are helped to increase, by shielding them from that mortality which their unworthiness would naturally entail, the effect is to produce, generation after generation, a greater unworthiness. From diminished use of self-conserving faculties already deficient, there must result, in posterity, still smaller amounts of self-conserving faculties.* . . . Such members, too, of a population as . . . are taken care of

*So that the relentless forces of Nature which cry va victis and drive the weakest to the wall,' have at least no venom in them, and in the end prove even beneficent.

by the rest, inevitably bring on the rest extra exertion. . . hence are they subject to an overdraw on their energies . . . tending to arrest the increase of the best and to deteriorate their constitutions. Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing to them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying, is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies. It may be doubted whether the maudlin philanthropy which, looking only at direct mitigations, persistently ignores indirect mischiefs, does not inflict a greater total of misery than the extremest selfishness inflicts.* . . . How far the mentally-superior may, with a balance of benefit to society (and to himself, as below), shield the mentally-inferior from the evil results of their inferiority, is a question too involved to be here discussed at length. Doubtless it is in the order of things that parental affection, the regard of relatives, and the spontaneous sympathy of friends, and even of strangers, should mitigate the pains which incapacity has to bear. . . . Individual altruism, left to itself, will work advantageously wherever, at least, it does not go to the extent of helping the unworthy to multiply. But an unquestionable injury is done by agencies which undertake in a wholesale way to foster good-fornothings, putting a stop to that natural process of elimination by which society continually purifies itself.'

So speaks this great thinker. It is a subject needing great caution and great knowledge in its treatment, and is fraught with much painful perplexity from whatever standpoint we view it, and can only be approached safely by those who unite in their natures the tenderness of the philanthropist with the far-seeing of the philosopher; so that I fear majorities cannot do much for its solution. Two seemingly opposing interests have to be reconciledthe alleviation of present misery compatibly with the interests of posterity. We have only to look to the disastrous effects of the working of the English poor-law to be convinced of the difficulty of dealing with any question from the standpoint of the emo

tions only, and that an evil may be aggravated and new evils engendered by looking too exclusively to the direct, while ignoring the indirect consequences of any measure.

It must be borne in mind, too, that all uncontrol-the prolific parent of a widespread family of miseries-is the result of a want of consensus between the organism and its mundane conditions, and that the absence of such consensus implies a failure of development or a degeneration of nervestructure; so that the uncontrollable individual, instead of having made a step in advance to meet the increasing complexities of life which can only be met by increasing complexity of organization, has dropped behind a step-it may be, many stepswhich, if he could realize, is marked by nerve degeneration, that is, by physical degeneration, which degeneration is inheritable by his offspring. Hence the great caution needed in dealing with the problem of the miseries and moral and mental weaknesses of mankind for the fatal hereditary craving' (p. 186) is itself the result of nervous degeneration-a sort of descensus Averni ingrained in the constitution, and which, while claiming our sympathy and help, demands more wisdom in dealing with it than I think any of the rough-and-ready wouldbe doctors of humanity have generally attained to for it is, indeed, a most perplexing problem.

Why do men drink? Human nature, though it has made great progress through the ages, has not yet so far advanced-her motto being festina lente-as to be reduced to harmony with its circumstances. The adaptation has not yet been carried far enough. The human creature, therefore, often gets ennuied; a feeling of restlessness, of dissatisfaction arises in the mind; he is ill at ease and craves excitement of some kind, and to allay the wearing and wearying feeling, one has recourse to the stimulus of alcohol, another of opium or Indian hemp, another of tea or coffee, another of gambling, or money-making, or politics, or novel reading, etc., etc.; for human life is not yet fully adjusted or specialized to its special conditions, but is only on the way towards that adjustment. The stimulus of war and of murdering and scalping and hunting down one another, and of feasting on the fallen and tortured foe, has been exchanged to some extent for the above-named excite

ment, and I think with benefit to the individual and the race. But-Rome was not built in a day-we are not sufficiently evolved for the stimulus of the conditions of life to be a sufficing stimulus to the mind. We still crave something additional, and shall do, so long as the harmony-more nearly approached by some than by others-is not perfect. Is it too much to expect-for is not the past the prophecy of the futurethat the man of the long future will have finer and keener sensibilities, his nervous system be such as to be more readily stimulated, that his more civilized and hightoned nature will find delights and pleasures in matters which to us look tame and uninteresting, and that he will be disgusted with and shrink from things which pain general humanity now as little as the scalping and the cannibal feast did our ancestors of old?

How many are there even now, whose more specialized and advanced organization enables them to respond pleasurably to the myriad slight ictuses of mental, moral, and aesthetic beauty presented to them everywhere, of which the duller and less differentiated brains of their fellows are almost wholly insensible. Let us only be patient. Give the thing time enough and all may yet go well. But of this we may rest assured, that our unwise haste and restrictive measures, commencing with palpable injustice, will only aggravate the evil tenfold.

In my 12th premise I had said that FIDELIS was bound to prove that a government possessed rights of a kind quite distinct from those possessed by individuals.' To this FIDELIS replies, that they have rights of a kind distinct,' for that 'it is a principle on which we act in all other matters.' This, of course, proves nothing. It only means, it is done because it is done, or, they do it in one case, and so may do it in another.

Now though this premise is only an adjunct, not a necessity, of my argument, I thought it best to introduce it, believing that the time will come when the question with the legislator will be, not is this law I am about to propose expedient, but is it just; a time when there will be a conviction in men's minds-which at present there seems not to be-that what is just is always expedient in the long run. It is so difficult, too, to decide on what is expe

dient; the circumstances are so many, the interests to be reconciled so diverse, that in almost every case a compromise has to be effected by striking, in a clumsy way, a kind of average never altogether quite satisfactory. But with the question of right, it is quite different. And here I call to mind a short story from the Cyropædia of Xenophon. I quote from memory and may possibly prove verbally inaccurate. His grandfather, the king, had told Cyrus that he must go back to Persia to learn justice. But, grandfather, said the boy, I have a most exact knowledge of justice. How so, said his grandfather. Thus, said the boy. A big boy at our school with a little coat, took a big coat off a little boy and gave the little boy his own small coat. Of this the little boy complaining, the master called on me to act as judge. Whereupon seeing that the small coat of the big boy fitted the little boy, and that the big coat of the little boy fitted the big boy, I gave my sentence for the big boy's retaining the big coat and the little boy's retaining the little coat. But for this, added Cyrus, I got whipped, my master adding that, if called on to judge which coat fitted each boy best, my decision was a good one; but that that was not the point at all, but a quite different one, to wit, of right and belonging. So you see, grandfather, I have a strict knowledge of justice.

Oh, for such schoolmasters and such pupils! With such instructors we should make short work with Dunkin Bills and Prohibitions. This grand old Pagan schoolmaster, how much might he not teach us in Christian Canada to-day. What a clear, discriminating judgment. Everything stood rounded to him in its just proportions, and no confusing haze of the emotions blurred the clear, calm eye of the judgment. When the claims of right and expediency jostled, the fine, true instincts of the man never hesitated for an instant, and he punished the poor little boy as though it were a disgrace for even a child not to see that, in a collision of right and expediency, right must triumph ever, and that the battle-cry in every encounter ought to be-Fiat justitia ruat cælum.

But why make such a fuss about individual liberty? My reply is that by touching this, you touch the apple of the eye of every human interest, of all that is grand,

and beautiful, and worth living for in the world.

But we restrict the liberty of the smallpox patient for the sake of others, and why not prevent one from taking or from selling a glass of wine for the same reason? But the cases are not parallel. The glass of wine won't injure me, but the smallpox would. Because the wine is exposed for sale, I am not obliged to take it; my will is not forced. But in the case of the smallpox patient at large, in the market and public thoroughfares, I am obliged to take it;

I can scarce avoid taking it; and since I have no right to injure another, another has no right to injure me, and therefore I am justified in seeing that he secludes himself for a short period.

But if 'governments have' exclusive rights, whence do they derive them? They are either usurped rights, over the people, or they are rights delegated to them from the people; but, if the latter, I can only say, that water cannot rise higher than its fountain-head.

But the whole thing hinges upon this, whether right or expediency is to be recognized as the basis of human government. I maintain that the individual has rights that are inherent and inalienable. FIDELIS maintains that the individual holds his rights by sufferance, and may rightfully be deprived of them whenever a majority decides that it is for the good of society that these rights be escheated. In short-for it comes to this there are no rights that may not rightfully be voted away and extinguished by a numerical majority, and, therefore, no rights at all: for the caprice of the voters constitutes our only real entitlement. Yet once admit this, once touch with the unhallowed finger of expediency the sanctity of right, and we put everything in jeopardy. But, in spite of all reactions to the contrary, we are, I conceive, working upward towards a state of belief that the highest crimes against man are 'TRESPASSES UPON HIS INDIVIDUALITY'; and, unless this be regarded as the very corner-stone of our liberties, 'new democracy is but old despotism differently spelt.' For, as Herbert Spencer further says, 'the worship of the appliances of liberty in place of liberty its lf, needs continually exposing. There is no intrinsic virtue in votes. The possession of representatives is not itself a

benefit. These are but means to an end; and the END is the maintenance of those conditions under which each citizen may carry on his life without further hindrances from other citizens than are involved by their equal claims.' This is a very weighty sentence-the summation of one who has studied the principles and laws of human nature, and the histories of human societies, as no other man, dead or living, ever has. The best education you can give a man is a sound and thorough saturation of his whole nature with a sense of his rights and of human rights; but it is impossible to uphold human rights and human freedom if you commence by destroying them. A government or a majority has no right to do me a wrong, and can have none. I possess the right to take a glass of wine. To deprive me of this right would be plain injustice; it would not be right, but the exercise of might to set right aside. This all is This all is involved in Prohibition. Prohibition, then, begins in wrong; builds on wrong; and no edifice built on wrong as its foundation can be stable. But this is not all: I am like wise to be forced to pay with a view to the upholding of this system of wrong-doingknocked down and punished for falling.

It is a strange idea, a grotesque-looking argument, which if FIDELIS has been able to make nothing out of, no one else need attempt. And what says she upon the subject-At the best' (page 185, the italics here and hereafter, as likewise in the quotations from Mr. Spencer, are mine) at the best, and in our best efforts, we are but groping through the dark-feeling our way amidst unknown quantities, making attempt after attempt, and experiment after experiment, and by-and-by, perhaps, hitting, after a blundering fashion, on something which succeeding ages at least, if not the present, will recognize as a great step in human progress.'

And for the sake of all this 'groping through the dark' and 'blundering' on in the vain hope that at last some remedy may 'perhaps' be stumbled on, I and the rest of us are to be deprived of innocent, if not useful, enjoyment, and to be taxed into the bargain for the support of our experimentalists while seeking for the philosopher's stone by which to convert the baser metal of humanity into precious gold, and to relieve men of the misery which has dogged the

footsteps of our race from the very first, though ever in a decreasing degree. And,' adds FIDELIS, with a candour beyond all praise, this is the best, the writer sincerely believes, that we can hope to do with the Temperance Problem; and if Prohibition do not prove the best solution, we may, amid our seeking, find something better on the way.' And we may find the North Pole and mermaids disporting themselves in that open sea and we may not. But one thing we certainly shall find at the end. of each experiment-our own terrible mistake. For a system born, cradled, nursed in wrong can never end in right; nor, wriggle out of or twist it as we will, can it ever be made to appear that the proper office of a government is to curtail the rights of any member of the body corporate, but rather to so reconcile the rights of all as to afford the fullest play to the individuality of each.

But people are not very likely to be won over from the error of their ways by anything I may have to say, if not already convinced by the clear and manly and powerful reasoning of the author (see CANADIAN MONTHLY for August) of 'CURRENT EVENTS'—a writer whose every page sparkles with brilliancy, toned down and tempered by profound thought and masculine sense, and whose style is so crisp and fresh and vigorous, and his mode of treating his subject so entirely his own, while at every turn we are encountered by surprises of novelty or originality, that where obliged to disagree with him, we feel that we do so reluctantly, and always with the respect due to a writer and thinker of no ordinary powers.

If the Maine Liquor Law be the blessing to the world which its advocates represent it to be, why is it that so many of the States of the American Union-Rhode Island, Massachusetts, &c.-which once adopted it with rejoicings, have fallen from their first love and reject it now? Is it that, having had experience of its effects, they can now judge of its merits? Or if it be said that those who voted for it at first had meanwhile become deteriorated, then, I say, the former system of non-prohibition had produced a moral character which prohibition-times have so lowered or not sustained, that they now reject the good they once rejoiced in.

And, in regard to the Dunkin Bill, it is