an of the Commission, who was then, and continues to be still,
Professor of Political Economy in Harvard University. Local option in
nine-tenths of our States, with prohibition of dram-shops everywhere:
what a change from a century ago! A man was almost mobbed in Boston the
other day for selling liquor to a minor. On being taken before a
magistrate, and afterwards tried in court, he was imprisoned for three
years. Arrests, fines and imprisonment for selling whiskey by the glass,
rather frequent ten years ago in New York, are seldom now heard of. The
American people are sober! It looks like a monstrous and incredible
folly that we read of, that, once, even otherwise sensible and
well-meaning gentlemen would, on occasion, get staggering drunk.

Wines of the finest quality, equal to the best of Europe, are made every
year in California, New York, and Missouri; and they are occasionally
placed upon the table at entertainments. But it is regarded as an
intolerable indecorum for a gentleman to drink more than a single glass,
or a lady half a glass, at a time.

There is no doubt that the large and magnificent coffee and cocoa
houses (the latter most commended on hygienic grounds), in all our great
cities, have made much more practicable the shutting up of the drinking
saloons that formerly lined our streets.

* * * * *

Another great sanitary improvement was the destruction, a few years
since, of all the tenement houses of New York and Boston, and the
prohibition by law of their re-erection. The mortality of New York was
lessened by one-third the very next year after it was done. I am glad to
hear that, following this good example, a Citizens' Philanthropic
Building Association has bought up most of the ground in the worst parts
of the down town Philadelphia suburbs, in order to put up blocks of
model lodging-houses there. It seems unfortunate that the terribly
destructive fire in Philadelphia in 1890, occurring when all the
fireplugs were frozen with zero weather, should have laid waste Arch,
Market, Chestnut, and Walnut Streets, rather than those dens of poverty
and misery.

* * * * *

When the new water supply for New York city and the Hudson River towns
from the Adirondack region, and those for Philadelphia from the upper
Delaware and Perkiomen, are completed, and sewage irrigation relieves
the rivers everywhere from pollution, it may be hoped that the yea