Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/248

  and the recognition of the danger of the use of alcohol as a beverage. Nothing can be more absolute than these unwritten prohibitory laws which discharge workmen seen in saloons and refuse to employ skilled men because they use spirits in moderation.

To repeal all restrictive and prohibitory laws and open the doors for the free use of rum is to act in opposition to all the facts or observation and experience. On the other hand, to insist that prohibitory laws are the only measures to correct the drink evils, or that high license and local option are equally powerful as remedies, is to assume a knowledge of alcohol and inebriety that has not been attained. The highest wisdom of to-day demands the facts and reasons for the use of alcohol, and why it should be literally and theoretically the cause of so much loss and peril to the race. All hope for the future solution of these questions must come from accurately observed facts and their teachings, and, like the problems of the stars above us, be determined along lines of scientific inquiry.



VERYBODY likes good butter and good cheese, but to a large proportion of our population these very desirable articles of food would come in under the head of luxuries. Perhaps more than ninety per cent of the butter consumed by our people is made on farms or in private dairies; a great deal of it is fit for a king's table, and more and more of this kind of butter is made every year; still, when we consider the number of small towns in the United States and the quality of the mass of butter which every week is brought to the corner grocery store in each one of these places, there to be exchanged for three cent calico or twenty-five-cent coffee, it is evident that a large proportion of our butter is unqualifiedly bad. As for much of the cheese sold, the trouble lies in another direction—less in faulty methods of manufacture than in a flooding of the market with an immature, indigestible, sole-leather product, which some of us may know from the dining rooms of second and third class hotels.

While we, therefore, may find fault with a large share of the dairy products sold in the United States, we can not wonder very much that such is the case. Not until of late years has thorough, systematic instruction in their manufacture been offered anywhere in this country. The fundamental principles of the 