XI / 100
Concerning Canada, for instance, our nearest neighbor, we can
only say that their government control system has certainly
worked splendidly for our citizens. Beyond this we can not go.
Viewing this hopeless confusion, we believe that our only
helpful contribution is a fair presentation of both sides of the
medal. We have added an undoubted educational value to our
little book by delving deep into the temperance--! use the
word in its particular sense--literature of the past.
Mt.
Hunt, my co-worker in the vineyard, if I may use a slightly
damp expression, has spent many hours poring over tracts, trea–
tises, primers, sermons, lectures, recitations and moral anecdotes,
which must be accepted as truthfully expressing the moral ideals
and aesthetic standards of their authors.
If
some of them appear improbable, such as the incident of
the errant Scotchman eaten by rattlesnakes, charity bids us
realize that the zeal of the reformer often runs away with his
veracity. Surely we should be temperate--in the obsolete
meaning
of
the word-in judging temperance and its advo–
cates.
To round out our survey of the Dry side and bring it up
to date we have added a few quotations from leading contem–
porary thinkers on the subject. Their utterances, too, must be
accepted as authoritative. This method, we feel, presents the
history of the temperance movement more picturesquely than
would a recital of dates and events from the founding of the
first temperance society, through the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment, to the what-have-we condition of today.
In presenting the Wet side of the controversy we have con–
fined ·ourselves to indirect but persuasive testimony. The recipes
given are quotations from great authors whose very lives were
devoted to combating aridity. In their prescriptions will be
found more physical and less moral uplift, more research and
less religion, than in the testimony of the Drys.
[vii ]