so opposed to the "drugs"
of the physicians and speak of them privately as poisons? Not the
Christian Scientists only--in intellectual Boston thousands of
educated women speak of drugs and nervine as belonging to a medieval
civilization which they have outgrown. The same national logic may
thus lead us to laws which will prohibit every physician from using
the resources of the drug-store--if they have not all simply to go
over to osteopathy.

_A Spring Flood of Emotional Legislation_

The question of the liquor trade and temperance--which is so widely
different from a hasty prohibition--has engaged the minds of all times
and of all nations, and is studied everywhere to-day with the means of
modern science. But this spring flood of prohibition legislation which
has overrun the States shows few signs of deeper connection with
serious study and fewer signs of profit from the experiments of the
past. When the Chinese government made laws against intemperance about
eleven hundred years before Christ, it can hardly have gone more
hastily to work than the members of this movement of the twentieth
century after Christ. It is unworthy of women and men who want to
stand for sobriety to allow themselves to become intoxicated with
hysterical outcries, when a gigantic national question is to be
solved, a question which can never be solved until it is solved
rightly. A wrong decision must necessarily lead to a social reaction
which can easily wipe out every previous gain.

Progress is to be hoped for only from the most careful analysis of all
the factors of this problem; yet, instead, the nation leaves it to the
unthinking, emotional part of the population. In the years of the
silver agitation it was a matter of admiration to any foreigner, the
wonderful seriousness with which large crowds listened in a hundred
towns, evening after evening, to long hours of difficult technical
discussion on currency; sixteen to one was really discussed by the
whole nation, and arguments were arrayed against arguments before a
decision was reached. Is it necessary that the opposite method be
taken as soon as this problem is touched--a question far more complex
and difficult than the silver question, and of far more import to the
moral habits and the development of the nation? When leading scholars
bring real arguments on both sides of the problem, their work is
buried in archives, and no one is moved to action. But when a Chicago
minister hangs