o be remedies in most of the countries of
Continental Europe, where drunkenness is seldom in evidence,
and furthermore, we can apply such laws without giving
offense save to those who by common consent are deserving of
condemnation as having done that which mankind recognizes to
be wrong, and having thereby placed themselves without the
pale.

That the liquor dealers should take this position is not so surprising as
at first thought it seems. Economically, the best condition for the liquor
business is temperance.

MACAULAY'S PROPHECY OF DEMOCRACY'S DOOM.

Fifty Years Ago the Great English Historian
Saw Dangers Ahead for the
American Ship of State.

Macaulay, the historian, wrote a striking letter in 1857 to H.S. Randall,
of New York, who had sent to the author of the "History of England" a
"Life of Jefferson."

The occasion seemed to Macaulay suitable for an expression of his opinion
of American institutions. Accordingly he wrote at length. The Boston
_Transcript_ recently published the letter, which, in its essential parts,
is as follows:

I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or
civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is
dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost
instantaneous.

What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure
democracy was established there. During a short time there
was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national
bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of
prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the
purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.

Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as
poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians.
Happily, the danger was averted; and now there is a
despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is
gone, but civilization has been saved. You may think that
your country enjoys an exemption from these evils; I will
frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion.

Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by
a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of
fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will
be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old
World; and while that is the case the Jefferson politics may