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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
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