cider, and sups on potatoes or cabbage greased with a bit of bacon rind. And precisely the identical testimony, varying only the staples of starvation, comes from Switzerland, Poland, and other countries. Now, all this requires something, and that something usually takes the form of something alcoholic. Poor Edgar Allan Poe produced his fascinating prose and marvelous poetry on dinners of herbs, and the well-fed, fat, greasy Honey-thunders and Podsnaps recognize the crime, not in the fact that such a man was left to eat such dinners, but that he took a glass of whisky to keep the life in his poor unnourished body while he wrote. Therefore Mr. Reed would make food as plentiful as Nature has enabled man to make it. In other words, a condition of unfedness requires the human system to crave alcoholic stimulants, and what the human system craves it must find, since the craving becomes functional, and impossible to disregard, malgre laws, systems, or statutes whatsoever. Even the children in Switzerland, says Dr. Schuler (quoted by Mr. Reed), are fed whisky between meals in order to sustain their tiny lives, the low regimen of whose mothers has given them the frailest possible hold on life to live at all. Mr. Reed believes also that, on public grounds, other effort for amelioration should be made by the State, such as shorter hours of labor, two holidays a week, etc. But as to these we will not follow him here. He makes his point, however, and his pamphlet is worth the consideration of philanthropists. It can not be denied that, with the exception of the shorter hours for labor and the general tendency to increase the number of holidays ("Labor Day," Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Lincoln Day, etc.), much of Mr. Reed's theories have got into our statute-books. And the general tendency to ameliorate the condition of the laborer, which is everywhere apparent in the United States, may fairly be alluded to here as among statutory efforts to the universal betterment.
[To be concluded.]
