ch meant France was dying. A commission was appointed
to look into the causes. When the report was made, alcohol headed the
list. Now by order of the government linen posters are put up in
public buildings, and on these in blood red letters are these
warnings: "Alcohol dangerous; alcohol chronic poison; alcohol leads to
the following diseases; alcohol is the enemy of labor; alcohol
disrupts the home!"

Who would have thought an Emperor of Germany would ever "go back" on
beer? Emperor William in an address to the sailors recommended
total-abstinence and forbid under penalty the giving of liquor to
soldiers in the world's greatest war. The Czar of Russia has put an
end to the government's connection with the manufacture of
intoxicating liquors, and our Secretary of the Navy has banished it
from the ships and navy yards. The New York Sun says: "The business
world is getting to be one great temperance league." For many years it
was confined to the realm of morals, but today it is recognized as a
great economic question and the business world is joining the church
world in solving the liquor problem.

While the temperance cause has been going up in character, the drink
has been going down in quality. The old time distiller used to select
his site along some crystal stream, that had its fountain-head in the
mountains and ran over beds of limestone. With sound grain and pure
water, he made several hundred barrels of whiskey a year, and after
five to ten years of ripening, it was sent out with the makers' brand
upon it. Now the North American of Philadelphia, one of our leading
dailies says, rectifiers (and I would prefix one letter and make it
w-r-e-c-k-t-i-f-i-e-r-s) take one barrel from the distillery and by a
pernicious, poisonous process, make one hundred barrels from one
barrel.

It is true the sting of the adder and the bite of the serpent were in
the old-time whiskey, but it was as pure as it could be made. Doctor
Wiley, Ex-Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry, says: "Eighty-five per
cent. of all the whiskey sold in the saloons, hotels and club-rooms is
not whiskey at all but a cheap base imitation." In the different
concoctions made are found aconite, acquiamonia, angelica root,
arsenic, alum, benzine, belladonna, beet-root juice, bitter almond,
coculus-indicus, sulphuric acid, prussic acid, wood alcohol, boot
soles and tobacco stems. No wonder we have more murders in this
republic than in any civilized land beneath th