ephemeral and is always followed by a corresponding fall of temperature. It is like the temporary increased heat of a fire under the action of the bellows: it quickens the glow but it does not sustain the steady burning of the fire. On the contrary, it really causes the fire to burn out more quickly without adding a grain to the fuel. It is impossible, consequently, to attach any value to alcohol as a warmer. It is positively a cooler of the blood and tissues, and combined with cold it expedites, in the most determinate manner, as my researches on the action of alcohol on pigeons showed, the fatal effects of extreme cold. The experiences of Arctic voyagers have proved

the same in man.

3. There is experienced in those who are accustomed to alcohol a sense of strength after taking it, and of firmness, which seems to be a good preparation for acts requiring precision, strength or endurance. Is that good? To those who rely on the assurance given in this way by alcohol, this is considered not only as good but as a necessity. The best that can be truly said of it, however, is that it is an acquired good, an acquired necessity. In itself it is bad, because the greatest benefits which it confers are poor indeed when compared with the precision, the strength and the endurance experienced by those who, being untouched by the habit of relying on wine, are accustomed to depend purely on natural agencies for their maintenance of vital labors. In a word, it may be accepted with absolute certainty that whenever a person habituated to alcohol feels that he is unable to perform any work which he wishes to perform unless he resorts to alcohol for assistance, he is so far under its influence for evil as to be in positive danger from it and from its interference with his natural vitality.

Summing up all the effects produced by alcohol during the primary and least hurtful stage of its action, there is no effect from it that can be pronounced either good or necessary for the healthy body, no effect that cannot be supplied by more natural and better means that is to say, by the aid of natural food and drink, neither of which alcohol can claim

to be.

It is one of the most distinctive effects of alcohol that when the taste for it has

once been acquired it makes for itself a special constitution which may most faithfully be designated the alcoholic constitution. When this constitution has once been formed it renders everything else subordinate to itself, according to the degree of alcoholic influence that has been established. Thus the person really temperate in the use of alcohol holds by his temperate habit as firmly as he who has established in himself the more dangerous habit of inebriety. These effects are purely physical, and they can be induced in animals inferior to man, by training, just as easily as in man himself. They are dependent on the affinity which alcohol has for the matter of the brain and the other nervous centers, in which centers it forms a habitat for itself, from which it can be removed only by longcontinued total abstinence.

Many persons go on for years under the simple action of the moderate effect of alcohol; they are never affected beyond the first stage of its action, and always assume that they feel the benefit of it. Others who have got so far are tempted to go a little farther under some excitement, recreation, work, worry, or one of the many incentives for stimulation, and so work themselves into the habit of the second stage, which is less easy to restrain than the first. Others slip habitually into the habit of the third degree, become regularly intemperate and so fixed in intemperance that they are all but irreclaimable. From this last group spring those lowest in the series of the habitual alcoholics, who suffer from general paralysis and who fitly and literally represent the individual in the fourth degree of acute alcoholic intoxication, dead to the world under the extreme paralyzing influence of the spirit they have imbibed.

These four classes of mankind form the four great populations of constitutionally-alcoholized humanity that exists out of the bonds and bounds of childhood. It is fortunate that as yet the first years of human life have been so far exempted from the alcoholic spell, for by this circumstance a full sixth of the term of each life is largely saved from the injury and danger of alcohol. Yet even this more fortunate section is not altogether free; for, unhappily, an agent which, like alcohol, is capable of inflict

ing so marked an impression on the nervous centers, is also capable of inflicting impressions which pass from parent to offspring and which implant by inheritance the constitutional habit. The inheritance of disease thus acquired from alcohol is not so strong as that of some other diseased conditions from other causes, and it is not, according to my observation, transmitted farther than the third generation; but it must be admitted as a factor tending to the production of alcoholic degeneracy and to the increase of the great populations sharing in one or other of the constitutional stages of alcoholic existence, and in the induced series of aberrations from the natural standard of health which furnish the large class of disorders, bodily and mental, now designated as the alcoholic diseases of mankind.

INJURIES, PHYSICAL AND MENTAL.

It will be clear to every reasoning and unprejudiced mind that a chemical substance which possesses the power of producing in the living so many varied and important changes as those which alcohol produces, cannot fail to induce, in the organs of the body, physical modifications which are either good or bad. That alcohol is incapable of imparting any good is now pretty generally acknowledged. Its elementary construction precludes the possibility of considering it as a substance or food which can build up or sustain any vital structure or organ, such as muscle or brain; and when it is freed from saccharine foods there is no evidence whatever for assigning to it the doubtful virtue of giving fat to the body. In small quantities it quickens, in large quantities it deadens nervous action. This is its summum bonum and its summum malum. The good is infinitesimalthe evil infinite. The physical injuries from alcohol are incomparably large because of their extent. They graduate from the simple exaltation of action, peculiar to the excitement of the first degree of its action, to the complete paralysis pertaining to the last degree. Whereever organic matter of the body is enfolded in membrane, there will alcohol penetrate and there will functional disturbances followed by organic degeneration be set up. We know now of a de

finite and connected family of alcoholic degenerative diseases. We are acquainted with alcoholic phthisis, or the consumption of drunkards; with hepatic cirrhosis, or induration of the drunkard's liver; with the dropsy arising from the hepatic cirrhosis; with alcoholic dyspepsia; with alcoholic epilepsy; with alcoholic hypertrophy, or enlargement of the heart; with alcoholic asthenia, or feebleness of the heart; with degeneration of the kidney and the accompanying train of kidney diseases classed vaguely under the term Bright's Disease. But the most widespread devastations from alcohol are those seated in the nervous system and displayed in mental aberration. The commoner known of these are the acute affections, delirium tremens, mania from drink, inebriety or repeated intoxication, to which must be added the less understood yet serious conditions, alcoholic epilepsy and alcoholic paralysis. This last-named disease, only recently clearly defined, is one of the most wide-spread of the chronic diseases resulting from alcohol, one of the most obscure and one of the most fatal.

MORTALITY FROM ALCOHOL.

An agent like alcohol, extensively and recklessly used by mankind in all parts of the world, and capable of inducing so many and serious diseases, must of necessity be the cause of a tremendous mortality, with the usual precedence of many days of utter disablement and dis

ease.

For

That is the fact. It is difficult to calculate the precise mortality from alcohol, because we have never yet fully diagnosed all the evils leading to disease and death which spring from it. example, up to this time we have not added the mortality due to alcoholic paralysis in the large computations from which our results have been drawn. Some years ago, from the best data I could obtain, I estimated that in England and Wales the annual mortality from alcohol was 50,000 per annum, an estimate fairly confirmed by other observers who have made inquiries of an important and independent character. Admitting its correctness, this estimate makes the mortality from alcohol to be about one-tenth of the whole mortality-a view which had previously been expressed by the late Dr.

movement is the greatest enemy to this needed reform.

8. They believe that the Prohibition movement, for the above reasons, is disgusting many, so that they take no interest in any temperance action. Prohibition is thus hindering moral effort.

9. They believe that all evils which are not in themselves crimes or sins should be remedied gradually, if the remedy is to be a permanent one.

10. They believe that the selling of liquor is not a crime or a sin, and that to class it with theft or murder is a gross fallacy.

11. They believe that the evils of liquor-selling are wholly in the excesses that have been connected with it, and that law should have regard only to those excesses. The crime or sin is in the excess and not in the selling.

12. They believe that certain forms and ways of liquor-selling, as especially dangerous, should for that reason come under the cognizance of the laws.

13. They believe that the justice of these sentiments is far more available to turn the public to a true temperance than the injustice of the Prohibitionist sentiments, which only exasperate men of good repute and enkindle opposition to

all reform.

14. They believe that Prohibition, if temporarily successful in any locality, will produce a fearful re-action in which the moderate men, as they were ignored by the extremists for Prohibition, will be in like manner ignored by the extremists on the other side.

HOWARD CROSBY.

Anti-Saloon Republican Movement.-A movement inaugurated in 1885 by Republican Prohibitionists of Kansas, for the purpose of inducing the Republican party everywhere to adopt "a platform of uncompromising hostility to the saloon;" pressed with considerable earnestness in different parts of the country by individual sympathizers; regarded, however, with but scant favor by the leaders and masses of the party, and practically abandoned after the Presidential campaign of 1888.

The defeat of Blaine, Republican candidate for President in 1884, was attributed by many to the large vote of the Prohibition party, and this was attributed

to the unsatisfactory attitude of the Republicans on the temperance question. When the bitter feelings occasioned by the result had been somewhat soothed, numerous temperance advocates, firmly attached to the Republican organization, began to hope that the party in seeking ways and means for regaining power would show favor for their views.

Albert Griffin, then editor of the Manhattan (Kan.) Nationalist, issued a call, dated Dec. 1, 1885, for a National Convention of Republican foes of the liquor traffic, to meet at Toledo, O., May 19, 1886. The call was entitled "Destruction to Dramshops," was addressed to "Enemies of the Dramshop," and was signed by 146 persons, residents of 63 towns of Kansas. It declared that the time had come "when this issue must be squarely made and fought out," and that "the Republican party must and will mount a temperance platform." It invited the co-operation of all earnest temperance men," provided they are working for the annihilation of the liquor traffic at the earliest possible moment," and closed by appealing to Republicans to "save the grand old party from disintegration." Half-way measures or compromising schemes were not contemplated by this call.

Mr. Griffin made a tour of the Eastern States, presenting his idea to prominent Republican leaders, and soliciting practical encouragement. He found, however, that the radical Kansas basis would not be acceptable to the responsible managers of the party. It was impossible, under these circumstances, to make the proposed National Convention a success. The Republican organ at Toledo, the Blade, although an outspoken opponent of the saloon (under the editorial management of D. R. Locke), regarded the movement with coldness and suspicion, and no State Convention was held to prepare for the proposed national meeting at Toledo. The original call was finally withdrawn, and a new call was issued, providing for a National Conference at Chicago on Sept. 16, 1886. This new call made material concessions to the timidity of party leaders, and defined the purposes of the movement in the following cautious language:

"In the opinion of those who called this National Conference, the party should not be

asked to commit itself nationally to or against any specific law. but should announce as its settled policy that it will everywhere strive to reduce the business of dramselling and the evils resulting from it as much as possible, each State to decide for itself from time to time what laws are best adapted to secure the end in view; and that whenever the people express a desire to vote on Prohibitory Amendments they should be given an opportunity. But whatever is done should be done honestly and with such emphasis that the men engaged in the liquor business will recognize the party as their enemy, and leave its ranks. Nothing short of that will satisfy the temperance forces, and that line of policy need not, and, if properly managed will not, alienate the mass of drinking men almost all of whom admit that the saloon is a deadly enemy to good order and every human interest. Some will, of course, leave us, but their ranks will in the near future be more than made up by temperance men of other parties who will join us until that issue shall be settled."

Despite the expressed dissatisfaction of many of the original signers, the elastic policy thus outlined was adhered to; and the Anti-Saloon Republicans manifested a very reasonable disposition in all the subsequent efforts that they made to control the party. Their failure was consequently all the more disappointing and signifi

cant.

The first State meeting held in support of their programme was for New Jersey, at Trenton, May 26, 1886. In a number of other States conferences met during the summer. The National Conference assembled at Chicago on the appointed day, Sept. 16, with about 200 delegates present. The tone of the Republican press was unfriendly. There was no suitable representation from the States except in two or three instances, and no very influential managers of party affairs were present. Vital demands made by the Pronibition element were rejected, particularly the demand that the party should favor the adoption of Prohibition. An objectionable declaration, recognizing taxation of the liquor traffic as a legitimate policy, was inserted in the platform. But there were many earnest and aggressive words spoken, especially by the Permanent Chairman, William Windom (Secretary of the Treasury under Garfield and afterwards under Harrison). Senator Henry W. Blair was Temporary Chairman of the Conference. The following is the platform adopted:

"First. That the liquor traffic as it exists today in the United States is the enemy of society, a fruitful source of corruption in politics, the

ally of anarchy, a school of crime, and with its avowed purpose of seeking to corruptly control elections and legislation is a menace to the public welfare and deserves the condemnation of all good men.

Second. That we declare war against the saloon, and hold it to be the supreme duty of the Government to adopt such measures as shall restrict it and control its influence, and at the earliest possible moment extinguish it altogether.

Third. We believe the National Government should absolutely prohibit the manufac ture and sale of intoxicating liquors in the District of Columbia and in all the Territories of the United States.

"Fourth. We believe the best practical method of dealing with the liquor traffic in the several States is to let the people decide whether it shall be prohibited by the submission of Constitutional Amendments, and until such Amendments are adopted, by the passage of Local Option laws.

"Fifth.-That inasmuch as the saloon business creates a special burden of taxation upon the people to support courts, jails and almshouses, therefore a large annual tax should be levied upon the saloons as long as they continue to exist, and that they should be made responsible for all sible for all public and private injury resulting from the traffic.

Eighth.-We demand that the Republican party to which we belong, and whose welfare we cherish, shall take a firm and decided stand, as the friend of the home and the enemy of the

saloon, in favor of this policy and these meas

ures.

We pledge ourselves to do our utmost to cause the party to take such a stand, and we call upon all temperance men and all friends of humanity of whatever party or name to join with us in securing these objects and in support of the Republican party so far as it shall adopt them."

No important results were brought about by the Chicago Conference. A National Committee was selected, with Albert Griffin as Chairman. It opened headquarters in New York, and some work was carried on. A few State meetings were held between September, 1886, and May, 1888, but the attendance was meagre in each instance, and the real leaders of the party could not be persuaded to exhibit active interest. The New York Weekly Mail and Express finally consented