prices of stocks and to make others believe that prices are about to fall when they in fact will rise or will rise when a decline is coming. There is not a leading railroad magnate in this country who can make even a plausible claim to having earned his millions. All have derived their vast wealth either through their own speculations or by inheritance of the winnings of ancestors. Gamblers study their calling and become expert in it. Wall street is a school which has developed the most expert manipulators of the stock market, and most of the multimillionaires who now have controlling interests in the great thoroughfares of the country are post-graduates of it. They are not educated to build and manage railroads or transact any other legitimate business, but to acquire stocks and obtain proxies.

The widespread demoralization of the passenger and freight service, now painfully apparent throughout the whole country, the wholly inexcusable destruction of life by train disasters, and the corrupt discriminations by which some shippers are enriched and others impoverished, are the legitimate fruits of a system through which gamblers dictate the policies of the railroad companies.

The people interested in railroads may be divided into three classes: 1. The

owners; 2. The operators; 3. The patrons. In power they rank in the order given, but in numbers and importance they rank in inverse order to that stated. The owners, though least in numbers, are the rulers. The great manipulators of the stock market control the elections and choose for directors men who will be subservient to their interests. All the man who invests his savings usually does is to give his proxy to some prominent stock-gambler.

The operators are mere employés of the company, who earn their daily bread in its service and greatly outnumber the owners. They are vitally interested in everything pertaining to safety of operation, but have no voice whatever in the

selection of the managing board or chief officers. Through their various organizations they exert some influence on the management in matters affecting their wages and the conditions of their employment, but none in other respects, and this much only because they are an essential part of the machinery.

The patrons, the great public, for whose accommodation the corporations are allowed to exist and operate railroads, have no voice whatever in the election of the board of directors or the selection of officers or employés of any grade. The board of directors holds the governing power in the corporation. The men it designates for the purpose, fix the rates to be charged for all services, determine the number and manner of operation of the trains, the location of all depots and other conveniences and everything else of any importance to the public. The living law-making and law-enforcing power resides in the management of the railroad companies, not in the general public as is fondly imagined by some. There is an old theory that the law is superior to the rules made under the authority of the board, and that all charges made by a common carrier for the transportation of person or property must be reasonable, but like many other old theories it is essentially obsolete.

Railroad companies are not often greatly concerned with the election of other than judicial and legislative officers. They take an interest in members of congress and the state legislatures; generally greater in the senators than the representatives, because the number is less and the term of office usually longer.

The pivot on which the public force of the country turns, so far as it affects railroad interests, is the United States Senate. When a legislature is about to elect a senator the tug-of-war comes and the railroad lobby, acting under the direction of its shrewdest schemers, combines on its candidate and exerts whatever influence appears likely to be most efficient to secure the choice of its man. It is responsible for most of the corruption which

has so scandalized the state legislatures. Having secured a majority of the United States Senate, either before or after election, it is secure against regulation by federal law.

This, however, is not the only, nor even the chief advantage gained. Federal judges are appointed by the President, "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate," and when once in office hold for life. With the aid of the senators from a state where a vacancy occurs, the railroads usually find no difficulty in procuring the appointment of the man of their choice. Here the utmost vigilance is used by their law departments. It is of vital importance that their man be named, and no stone is left unturned to gain the result. They alone of all the people are alert and vigilant in the matter. They appreciate its importance to them, while the general public leave their interests to the care of the President and the politicians, without giving them any impulse in opposition to the railroad influences. Having their fast friends on the federal benches they have little to fear from Congress or the legislatures. Laws duly enacted by the bodies named by the people to make laws may be "unconstitutional." They are so if the courts say they are, and a court so selected will say so whenever they seriously affect the interests of the great gamblers to whose underlings the judges owe their places. The federal courts can and do annul substantially all acts of the legislatures of the states which affect the revenues of great corporations. There has as yet been no occasion to annul any act of congress attempting to regulate transportation charges, for none has been passed. The interstate commerce law, designed to give a commission power to correct some abuses, has been emasculated by the constructions placed on it by the federal courts. Through either a declaration that an act is unconstitutional or a construction taking the vitality out of it, the court can easily defeat any law. The great railroad corporations, through the influence they exert on leg

islatures, congress and courts, come much nearer ruling the people than the people do to making laws for them.

If railroad stocks represented merely the savings from honest industry, and railroad directors were fair representatives of a great number of citizens who had contributed their means to build the roads, there would be a better basis for the exercise of their authority. But the fact is that most boards of directors are made up in great part of lawyers and other favorites and dependents of the chief gamblers who control a majority of the stock. When the interests of the masters require an alternation of favorable and unfavorable showings of results from operation to raise and depress the prices of stocks, boards of directors must be made up of men who are not too deeply interested in efficient management, but understand also the opportunities afforded by disaster. So it has happened and is the fact that very many men sit on boards of directors who have no stock or interest in the company worth mentioning, no knowledge of the practical operation of railroads and no real manhood leading them to insist on good service and just dealings with the public. So long as great gamblers name the governing bodies of the railroads so long they will follow gamblers' standards of morality.

No one need hope for substantial reform till an element of society having higher moral standards names the directors and dictates the policies of the railroad companies. With the United States Senate made up in large part of men possessed of ill-gotten millions and purchased seats, and federal courts constantly recruited from the law departments of the railroad companies or their special friends, the schemes of gamblers and monopolists will continue to prosper in spite of public sentiment and legislative attempts at regulation. There can be no permanent or effectual remedy without dethroning the gamblers.

Topeka, Kansas.

STEPHEN H. ALLEN.

IF

F EVER any effort has been made by any temperance organization to find the connection between inebriety and social economic conditions, and to treat the former as a symptom of the latter and not as a phenomenon of itself, such an effort has remained unknown to me. And yet, it seems to me that all attempts to suppress habitual drunkenness must be futile unless the social conditions surrounding the great mass of the working population are improved. More than that, it seems to me that the improvement of the conditions of the working-classes would be the only resonable and effective temperance reform.

The temperance question is preëminently an economic question. It is part and parcel of the great social problem of a proper distribution of the products of the labor of human society, and there is no solution outside of the solution of the great general social problem.

In a little book of Bishop Henry C. Potter, entitled The Drink Problem in Modern Life, I find the following wise words:

"We progress steadily and splendidly in the fertility of our inventions; but, as the cleverness and adroitness of machinery rises, the demands upon the cleverness and adroitness of the workman diminish. And yet they cannot diminish without leaving his task more circumscribed, more mechanical, and more monotonous. Do we know how mechanical and monotonous, at last, it may become, and do we know what a mechanical monotony at length takes out of a man? For, until we do, we are in no position to judge our brother, who, at the end of his day's tasks, turns to stimulants or narcotics which to us may be abhorrent. His home and yours have you ever compared them?

His leisure and yours, his environment and yours, his food and the conditions of its preparation, his recreations, companionships-in one word, his resources and yours do you know, not how like, but how utterly unlike they are? And yet, when you talk to this brother man, you are surprised, it may be, to find in him tastes and sympathies and aspirations not unlike your own! What chance have they, and what warrant have you and I, for criticisms, behind which has been no single effort to better the habits which they assail, or the conditions out of which those habits have sprung?"

The poor man or woman whose earnings are too meager to provide sufficient food, and who tries to cheat nature by the attempt to draw strength from the use of alcoholic stimulants, is the victim of our economic conditions.

The squalid home, be it in a miserable shanty or in a filth-reeking tenementhouse, from which the poor laborer flees to the saloon to seek warmth and light, recreation and companionship, is the product of economic conditions prevailing in human society.

The meager education of the laborer, his bad habits and his want of manners, his coarseness and brutality are the result of a system which drives children into the factory and into environments which injure their young impressive souls. The child is deprived of a better education, and the foundation is laid upon which the future drunkard grows. A brute is created who commits excesses, when drunk. Drinking, even excessive drinking, does not make a man a brute who is not already one. It only makes him act as a brute, by taking from him the power of self-control.

If a laboring man should happen to

lose his job, and if, as sometimes happens, he searches in vain for weeks or months for another, so that at last despair seizes upon him, or if, in moments of loneliness, he should think of his future, and the entire hopelessness of his condition should dawn upon him, if then in his despair he should take recourse to drink, who is to blame for it? Is not the cause for his efforts to drown his sorrows in drink in our economic conditions?

Nobody has a right to judge the drunkard who is unable to read in his soul. With the exception of comparatively few cases of heredity, the drunkard is the victim of economic social conditions, and where the vice is one of heredity, the ancestor was the victim.

Sometimes poverty is the result of habitual drunkenness, but such cases are individual. As a social factor, poverty is a cause of habitual drunkenness, and it is the cause in probably ninety cases of a hundred.

Yet, in an age in which the inventive genius of man has created such facilities of production that the productive power of man has increased, twenty, fifty or a hundred fold, and has far outgrown his natural power of consumption, poverty is a social crime.

There are also rich drunkards, of course, but as a result their families do not suffer from want of the necessities of life. The cause, however, may also be ascribed to economic conditions. For a life of idleness and affluence easily leads to dissipation. So does the life of a gambler, and a large part of modern business is nothing but gambling.

To meet such conditions with prohibitory laws is the height of absurdity. The theory of prohibition is born of ignorance and short-sightedness. Ignorance is creative of fanaticism. Knowledge never creates fanatics, but it creates liberation of thought, broad-mindedness and a thirst for more knowledge and tol

erance.

The absurdity of prohibition becomes so much more apparent, when we reflect

that it affects millions of good people who have a natural desire for a light alcoholic stimulant, such as beer or wine, it being as cheering and harmless to them as the cup of tea or coffee to the woman leading a temperance crusade. Why should one drink tea or coffee, if they were not cheering, exhilarating, stimulating? It cannot be said of them, as of wine or beer, that they contain some nutritious elements, but their active principle is poison as surely as alcohol. They must be used with moderation or they become injurious. And there are, beyond question, many men who exercise in their occasional, or even daily use of light alcoholic drinks more moderatiou than many a woman in her habitual use of tea or coffee.

Moderation is an attribute of culture. Just as the cultural progress of society would have been impossible without material progress, so is individual culture impossible without the possession of the necessaries and comforts of life in a degree which allows ample time for study, education, leisure and the creation of pleasant surroundings. pleasant surroundings. Intellectual culture creates moderation, but prohibition never. Culture creates moderation, not only in the use of stimulants, but in everything else. Moderation and refinement are pretty much the same. Poverty never creates them, but on the contrary kills them where they exist.

There is only one reliable, radical temperance measure, and that is the betterment of the economic condition of the masses, brought about by a change of the economic system which makes extreme wealth and extreme poverty equally impossible, and secures a distribution of the products of human industry in a manner more just than the present.

Material changes in social systems, however, coming only gradually, and being only the result of a slow process of development, and all our prohibitive and coercive legislation, having not only proven futile, but injurious to public and private morals, the question natu

rally arises: Can nothing at all be done by legislation toward the elimination or, at least, the decrease of inebriety? An answer to this question has been given about twenty years ago by the government of the Swiss Republic. It appointed a commission to investigate the liquor traffic. The commission, in connection with the Swiss Federal Bureau of Statistics, instituted an exhaustive inquiry, extending it over all civilized countries, and laid down the knowledge and experience gained in a very voluminous report. It was certainly the most earnest and exhaustive investigation of the subject ever undertaken. The commission stated as a fact that it had found the evil effects of alcoholism most prevalent in the localities where the number of drinking places was smallest, and as a conclusion that the reduction of the number of drinking-places tended not to a restriction of the consumption of ardent spirits, but that, on the contrary, tippling at home and the use of strong drink in place of light drinks were generally the result of reducing the number of conveniently-located drinking-places.

From the report of the commission the government evolved the following principles for liquor legislation as the only ones which promise wholesome effects:

1. Taxation ranks foremost among the measures calculated to restrict the

excessive use of ardent spirits. They should be taxed at as high a rate as is compatible with revenue considerations and the possibility of collecting the tax.

2. A systematic diminution and the ultimate abolition of taxes upon wholesome beverages, in which the percentage of alcohol is small, as in light wines and malt beverages.

3. The suppression of technically imperfect distillation, and governmental supervision to prevent adulteration.

Swiss legislation has since been based upon these principles, and they are surely more democratic and more in consonance with human nature than the theories of our well-meaning but overzealous, because misinformed, prohibition enthusiasts.

ΟΝ

NE CAN not speak of the sentimental side of our national library without reference to New Hampshire. Not only was this the first state to found a library supported by a universal compulsory tax, but the granite of our national library building lay in the hills of Concord, when, in 1825, the father and creator of our national library, Mr. Ains

worth Rand Spofford, was born nearby amidst the New Hampshire hills.

Until 1864, when Mr. Spofford became chief librarian, the development of the congressional library was a pathetic struggle of a feeble organism with an inadequate environment. If other things than flowers grow only in the gardens of those who love them, perhaps Edward