f of the league. Such a visitor
is apt to speak to one church in a village, and two in the country, on
each excursion, being met at the station by some leading farmer-citizen
of the section, and driven to these points by him. The talk with this man
was worth it all to me.

The agricultural territory of the United States is naturally dry. This is
because the cross-roads church is the only communal institution, and the
voice of the cross-roads pastor is for teetotalism. The routine of the
farm-hand, while by no means ideal in other respects, keeps him from
craving drink as intensely as other toilers do. A day's work in the open
air fills his veins at nightfall with an opiate of weariness instead of a
high-strung nervousness. The strong men of the community are church
elders, not through fanaticism, but by right of leadership. Through their
office they are committed to prohibition. So opposition to the temperance
movement is scattering. The Anti-Saloon League has organized these
leaders into a nation-wide machine. It sees that they get their weekly
paper, instructing them in the tactics whereby local fights have been
won. A subscription financing the State League is taken once a year. It
counts on the regular list of church benevolences. The state officers
come in to help on the critical local fights. Any country politician
fears their non-partisan denunciation as he does political death. The
local machines thus backed are incurable mugwumps, hold the balance of
power, work in both parties, and have voted dry the agricultural
territory of the United States everywhere, by the township, county, or
state unit.

The only institutions that touch the same territory in a similar way are
the Chautauquas in the prosperous agricultural centres. These, too, by
the same sign are emphatically anti-saloon in their propaganda, serving
to intellectualize and secularize the dry sentiment without taking it out
of the agricultural caste.

There is a definite line between our farm-civilization and the rest. When
a county goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county-seat. Such
temperance people as are in the court-house town represent the
church-vote, which is even then in goodly proportion a retired-farmer
vote. The larger the county-seat, the larger the non-church-going
population and the more stubborn the fight. The majority of miners and
factory workers are on the wet side everywhere. The irritation caused by
the gases in the mines,