Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/42

32 at all. In Massachusetts, for instance, the most enlightened State of North America, where the question has been discussed pro and con, and the friends of alcohol have been worsted, the condition of the working class proves my statement. On a visit there I went through one of the cloth factories and was surprised when the foreman told me a certain workman wished to talk with me because he had learned I knew about microscopes. He wished to know what microscope was most in favor in Germany. I described a good one of moderate price, twenty dollars; but he said he had one of that sort and wished now a better one. On questioning him I found he really had knowledge about bacteria, for the study of which he wished his instrument; that he was president of a club of workmen who spent their leisure hours in this study. When I then looked at the homes of these workmen, with their pretty, well-tended gardens and blooming, well-dressed children, I felt clearly the different atmosphere where the father spends his spare time and money not for alcohol, but for the beautifying of his home. And can this life be less enjoyable than ours?

In Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth he has devoted one chapter to the consideration of the pleasant character of American life, in which he calls attention to the general air of hopefulness which prevails among American people and extends also to all foreigners who visit them, through which, moreover, difficulties are lightly overcome, losses and injuries good-naturedly endured. One misses this characteristic painfully among us when one has once experienced it; it is like a new melody in the great concert of life. . . . And what says this melody? I understood it first as I saw this hopeful spirit, and I said to myself. Must mankind then be always miserable? Must they be always helpless against Nature's forces? Can they not conquer these forces, make them subservient, if they use intelligence to understand them instead of stupefying themselves? Must they pine away for lack of pleasure in a world which is so beautiful that it charms us if we lift but the corner of the veil which hides its secrets? This it is which makes me consider life without alcohol more beautiful than the other, and that is the transformation in the feeling of mankind which I await with their development.

Nothing retards this development except that we are bound by the customs of the middle ages. The conditions of the middle ages have vanished, but the habit of stupor still remains, as if, in place of the serfs and lords of old, a new man had not come who can use his manly powers. See what this inheritance of inactivity costs us. Statistics of last year show that in Switzerland every tenth man who died, died directly or indirectly from drink; that of men between forty and fifty-nine years old every