that one of the saloons near Fort Sheridan was established shortly before the new law went into effect, and he has found that some of the soldiers after pay-day become the victims of worse evils than drunkenness in the vile saloons to which they now go for liquor. Apart from his own personal investigations, his book takes up the evidence of army officers respecting the workings of the canteen, and while there are no statistics comparing the posts in which no liquor was sold (those in prohibition States) with the posts in which beer and wine was sold in the canteens, there are most convincing statistics showing that the canteen system was a great improvement on the older system of permitting post traders to reap private profit by supplying liquor to the soldiers.

The Canteen: A General's Cr' :icism

The other important contribution to the discussion of the canteen is a letter from General A. S. Daggett, who retired from the army last spring after forty years' service. General Daggett

criticises the sale of beer and wine in the canteen, not because of any a priori objection to the participation of the Government in the liquor business, but because of his belief that the very respectability of drinking in the canteen is a source of further danger to the great body of the soldiers. He puts his argument so compactly that we can best give it in his own words:

(1) Many of our soldiers come from the rural districts, where they never entered nor

with a majority of its men more or less under the influence of liquor, but not so much so as to subject them to punishment; but they could not perform their duty as well as they could if they had not been drinking.

(4) If there is no canteen at an army post, saloons will spring up just beyond the military respectable soldiers will no visit them. When reservation, but of so vile a character that I commanded a company, four-fifths of my men would not go near such dens of vice.

The canteen system, in my opinion, resolves itself into this question: Is it best to keep a constant temptation before the total abstainers and moderate drinkers for the purpose of controlling the few drunkards?

Many of our railroad companies and busiemployees. Only imagine their establishing ness firms require total abstinence of all their canteens for them! Trainmen slightly dazed with beer! I believe the Government should require the same of the army.

General Daggett's view of the canteen, it may be recalled, is not that of the great body of army officers. At the present time the War Department is engaged in collecting from all the posts the views of the officers as to the workings of the new law, and the indications are that Congress at its next session will be asked to repeal the statute, so as to restore the sale of beer and light wines. The total abstinence societies, we believe, are also collecting evidence with a view to prevent such action. It is well that the investigation is being pushed from different standpoints, for moral statistics are peculiarly susceptible of partisan treatment, and on this subject the public is peculiarly interested in knowing the whole truth.

they find the saloon, called canteen, established by the United States Government, managed by army officers, and in many cases made as reputable as such an institution can be. It is the place of resort for nearly all the soldiers of the garrison. They live in an atmosphere that makes them feel that the thing to do is to spend their money at the canteen; it helps the company mess. The most of the recruits yield, and soon form the beer habit.

(2) The canteen stands as a constant invita tion to the total abstainer to drink, as a temptation to the moderate drinker to drink more, and as a convenience to the drunkard to load up on beer when he has not the means to obtain anything stronger.

(3) The constant presence of the canteen and the credit system offer opportunities for the soldiers to keep slightly under the influ ence of liquor all the time. It was no unusual thing to find a company (I commanded a company more than twenty years), on inspection,

President

The careless use of the English language, depriving its most solemn words of their true solemnity, makes it impossible to find language in which to express the commingled sentiments of horror and apprehension awakened in the hearts of the American people by the attempted assassination of President McKinley. It is truly terrifying to reflect that in less than half a century two Presidents have been assassinated and a third dangerously if not mortally wounded, and each of them without having given, by any act or speech, justification, excuse, or even palliation for the assault. Mr. Lincoln was

one of the best friends the South ever had; Mr. Garfield was a chivalrous representative of the best sentiments in American politics; and Mr. McKinley enjoys the respect of political opponents as well as of political friends, and has done nothing to arouse personal enmity in either. Nor is it materially reassuring to remem. ber that the assassin of President Lincoln was unbalanced, of President Garfield half crazy, and of President McKinley possibly not of strong intellect. The fact remains, on the one hand, that there are forces at work in our boasted civilization which breed assassins, and, on the other, that no excellence of character and no device of guardianship suffice to protect the Chief Magistrate of the Nation from any man whose mania takes the form of a passion for perpetrating public murder.

The assassinations of President Lincoln and of President Garfield are at least comprehensible; we can understand how the passions of the Civil War, inflamed by defeat, should have excited to the one, and how the factional strife within the Republican party should have aroused sufficient venom in a disappointed adventurer to cause the other. But it is more difficult to understand this attempt at the assassination of President McKinley. His democratic sympathies, his sincere good will toward all men whether political supporters or political opponents, his readiness to give public credit to public rivals, his native urbanity of manner, his perhaps too compliant temper, and his tact in all public and private relations, have combined to give him probably fewer enemies than any other man who ever occupied the Presidential office, not excepting even President Hayes. It is true that the policy which he has represented has been bitterly opposed, and occasionally some one, who knew no other way to be strong than by being bitter, has assailed him as an American Napoleon who was attempting to build up an imperialistic government on the ruins of the Republic. But a characteristic sense of humor has prevented the American people from taking such oratorical invectives seriously. The weighty opponents of the policy of expansion and it has some weighty opponents-have recognized that it was the policy of the people, and have made their attacks upon the spirit of the age, not upon

the man who chanced to be its representátive and executive. So cautious has Mr. McKinley been in every successive step that he has been accused of being a follower rather than a leader of public opinion, and there is good reason for saying that he has rather been its embodiment than either. The murderous assault upon him cannot be charged to the account of either personal or political animosity. It is also unlikely that it is due to any distinct Anarchistic conspiracy. It is true that there is a body of Anarchists in this country who have brought their Old World hatreds with them, and whose acts and utterances are SO wholly irrational as to suggest that they should be classified among the intellectually degenerate if not absolutely among the insane. It is also true that the statements of President McKinley's assailant show that he belongs to this class of assassins. But it is also true that both the acts and the utterances of the Anarchists indicate that they have sufficient method in their madness to avoid depriving themselves of the only two asylums. England and America, in which they can live and proclaim their principles-if Anarchism can be called a principle-without interference from the Government. Our readers may remember the striking article by Mr. Francis H. Nichols on "The Anarchists in America" in The Outlook for August 10; and we recall to their remembrance the following quotation, made in that article, from an Anarchist paper in San Francisco: "The Anarchists are treated with sufficiently gross injustice even in this country. But they are at least allowed the right of conducting a peaceful propaganda; and the consequence is that McKinley, hated and despised though he is, needs no bodyguard to protect him from the attacks of revolutionists." We have no doubt that this truly expresses the policy of the Anarchists in America, in so far as they can be said to have a policy; and probably it will be found that this irresponsible Pole was acting on his own initiative, not under the specific commands of any society of assassins, although he was undoubtedly incited to crime by the violent utterances of Anarchist speakers and writers.

But this fact, if it be a fact, only adds to the difficulty of the situation. If neither

a policy of rigorous repression nor one of absolute freedom of expression can do anything effectual to prevent murder, if assassination of public men thrives equally in Russia and in America, it is evident that the time has fully come for thoughtful men to consider afresh the question, How in this twentieth century can life be preserved? This is a fundamental question, but one apparently not so simple as it has been deemed. Murder as the product of covetousness and accompanied by robbery we know; murder as an act of malignancy inspired by personal revenge we know; murder by a fanatic rendered desperate by a despotism from which he foolishly expects relief by the assassination of the despot we know; but the attempted assassination of President McKinley falls into none of these categories. So far as we can judge, this attempted murder is the act of a man chiefly inspired by that most inexplicable and most despicable of ambitions, the desire for notoriety; the most despicable, and yet, in a democratic community, with its characteristic passion for publicity, liable to become more common in the future than in the past.

This is not the time to attempt any estimate of President McKinley's character and career. It is enough to say that his political opponents have rated his abilities more highly than his political supporters, and that European observers have rated them more highly than have Americans. We believe that posterity will ratify the higher judgment, and that history will rank President McKinley more highly than his contemporaries have done, not only as an astute politician, but also as a popular leader and a broadminded and cautiously progressive statesman. His death would be felt as a personal loss by thousands who know him only through his public life, and by the entire Nation as a great public calamity. But it is not probable that it would affect in the slightest degree our National policy. Mr. McKinley is by nature a diplomat; Mr. Roosevelt is by nature a soldier; but in their political principles, in their National and international policies, in their practical opportunism, in their high ethical standards, and, above all, in their subordination of personal ambition to National welfare, they are alike. Not even Mr. Bryan could, were he President, turn

the Nation back from the goal toward which Mr. McKinley has been leading it as a world power; Mr. Roosevelt neither would nor could materially expedite its movement. But the whole American people will pray that Mr. McKinley may live to carry his policy forward to the completion of its present stage, in the perfected emancipation of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, and to initiate that further. movement toward industrial and commercial internationalism to which he pointed in his prophetic speech at the Pan-American Exposition the day before the assault.

Substitutes for the Saloon

The saloon as a social center, which is the subject of Mr. McNutt's vivid article on another page, is also the subject of the last volume issued under the direction of the Committee of Fifty for the Investigation of the Liquor Problem. The volume is entitled "Substitutes for the Saloon," and its author, the Rev. Raymond Calkins, of Pittsfield, Mass., presents the results of inquiries in all parts of the country, illuminating the point which Mr. McNutt's personal experiences drove home to him, that while the saloon thrives chiefly upon the craving of men for intoxicants, its field of influence is enormously widened by the way in which it ministers to social needs not elsewhere met.

Mr. Calkins's investigations show that the importance of the point here suggested is being realized in other countries besides our own. In England the realization of it has given rise to the coffee-house movement, begun thirty-one years ago by Simon Short, a converted drunkard of Bristol, with the financial support of a few Quakers truly led by the inner light. In Norway and Sweden the same thought has led to such regulations of the Gothenburg system shops as will prevent the town drinking-places from becoming the centers of social life. In many of these dispensaries, as in all of those of South Carolina, no liquor may be sold to be drunk on the premises. "Even in Christiania, where the shops of the company offer the most attractions, there is little to remind us of the Ameri can saloon. They are not resorts for social intercourse; they are not comfort

able and spacious. No gan.es, newspapers, or other means of recreation are provided, not even seats. Men do not congregate there to do business, to discuss politics, to bet on the races. There is no treating or lingering over the social glass.'" Along with this restrictive regulation has gone the constructive requirement that the profits of the shops must go, in large measure, to the establishment of substitutes for the saloon of an educative and recreative sort.

Switzerland makes a similar provision for the use of a part of the profits from the Government monopoly of the manufacture of spirits, and even Russia is accompanying its restriction of the sale of liquor to Government shops with the establishment of a system of preventive agencies. Reading-rooms with libraries and cheap, attractive restaurants are being opened near public gardens and squares where the working-people congregate. The restriction of the sale of spirits to Government shops, says Mr. Calkins, will, within a year or two, be extended into seventy-five provinces, or nearly three-quarters of the whole empire, and already the opening of temperance resorts has extended until there are nearly two thousand tea-rooms and tea restaurants, nine hundred and forty-three reading-rooms and libraries, besides many readings in hired halls and other similar popular attractions. In 1899 the Government spent one million dollars in support of the temperance taverns.

In our own country the number of the substitute agencies that have been developed is, in a sense, most gratifying, for it shows that in nearly every locality there has been some awakening and some effort on the part of the municipality, or private philanthropy, or the churches, to meet the social needs which the saloon has everywhere ministered to. The Young Men's Christian Associations have provided the means of recreation and education for a vast number of young men (although Mr. Calkins points out that it is but a small fraction of those in the shops and factories). Reading-rooms, playgrounds, gymnasiums, and bathing, establishments have been opened in a great many places, churches and settlements have organized clubs of every description, and even the minor needs to

which Mr. McNutt alludes-drinkingfountains, watering-troughs, comfort stations, cheap lunches at all hours of the night-have been here and there provided for. Some of the religious organizations which have done social work have but too plainly used it as a bait to bring people to their religious meetings, but others have rendered the social services from a wholesome desire to help their fellows.

Quite apart from all these distinctively philanthropic efforts to meet in wholesome ways the wants met by the saloons, there is a vast work of the same sort carried on by organizations avowing few or no altruistic ends, but endeavoring, largely from selfdefense, to promote the manhood of their own members. Among the organizations of this sort are the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the mutual benefit associations for all purposes including insurance and building and loan, the musical societies, the literary societies, the athletic societies, and finally-and perhaps the most important of all—the trades-unions. The work done by these last for the promotion of temperance among their members is described at length in a valuable appendix by Professor Bemis, which is perhaps the most encouraging report in the volume-though it shows that many of the unions in our great cities hold their meetings in halls connected with saloons. As a rule, such halls are the only places where the unions can meet, just as they are the only places where the poor can hold their social entertainments. Clearly our great cities need a public hall for every ward of fifty thousand people, quite as much as New England needs a public hall for every town of five thousand people, and some day our great cities may follow the example of the New England towns in providing such halls. The provision of wholesome meetingplaces for societies which are the natural outgrowth of the social, intellectual, and economic activities of the people is generally a better work than the organization of new clubs in which the people may spend their leisure; for a leisure club offering nothing for idle minds to do develops an atmosphere similar to that of the saloons. The substitution most deeply needed, now as always, is less the substitution of a wholesome for an unwholesome environment than the substitution