beings for whom alcohol in any form is a dangerous thing. Prohibition laws have been passed because a voting majority of the citizens have thought it desirable to close the saloons, hoping thereby to restrict the sale of liquor to the comparatively small but very obnoxious minority who are made mentally and morally aberrant by its use.

In the Southern States, in particular, it is scarcely pretended that a large proportion of the population has any intention or desire to abstain from the use of alcohol. The thought is simply that by passing prohibitory laws it may be possible to keep liquor from the poor whites and negroes. Care is taken to have the laws so framed that the more intelligent and prosperous members of the community shall incur no difficulty in securing whatever liquor they desire.

But the great difficulty is that prohibitory legislation does not, in point of fact, effect the object aimed at. The individuals whom it designs to protect against their own appetites are precisely the ones who refuse to be thus protected. By hook or by crook they secure alcohol. The legalized channels being closed through which liquor that at least has the merit of purity might have been obtained, illicit channels are found through which to secure liquor of inferior quality. If the amount of this is in some cases curtailed, its bad quality more than balances the restricted quantity.

Dr. Williams therefore very wisely feels that we should attack the problem from another angle. We should recognize the fact that for the generality of normal people the use of alcohol is a social habit, and that therefore the restriction of its use must come about through the modification of social habits. This means that if we are to oust the saloon, we must provide substitutes for it that more than compete with it in attractiveness. While theoretically he would place the saloon under government control, he feels that this would not work out in a practical way. He would therefore let the saloon remain under private control, but regulate its business methods very strictly. Existing evils are many and society demands a remedy, but the remedy must have a practical rather than a theoretical basis. Dr. Williams pleasantly suggests that up to the present time we have been putting the cart before the horse.

"OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS." By HORACE KEPHART, was published by the Outing Publishing Co., New York City, in 1913. Some eight years ago the author of this book went down into the "Great Smoky Mountain Region," to explore the country and its people. It was indeed "undiscovered country." In no library, could

he find a guide to that region, nor was there any magazine article or novel at that time, which showed intimate local knowledge. Only when, as a last resort, he consulted the Public Documents did he get a map which gave him a clear idea of the lay of the land. Had he been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu he could have found plenty of information to guide him, the Alps or the Rockies are more familiar to American people than are the Black, the Balsam and the Great Smoky Mountains, and the real Mountaineer is only known by hearsay. "The mountaineers of the South," he tells us, "are marked apart from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation." So true is this that they consider all outsiders "furriners."

So much for an introduction into what the author calls "moonshine land," for his book has some 200 pages on the "moonshine" feature of the mountaineer's life, and is for this reason of particular interest. It was only after he had gained a thorough knowledge of the country and the implicit confidence of his neighbors, if so secluded a people could be called neighbors, that he was able to obtain a familiar footing with the moonshiner and visit him in his lair.

Let no one think that the "moonshiner," or "blockader” as he is known on his native heath is a dishonest citizen whose one aim in life is to defraud his government. He simply disagrees with the governmental principle of internal revenue taxation. To quote from one of them :

"They believe in supportin' the Government, because hit's the law. Nobody refuses to pay his taxes, for taxes is fair and squar'. Taxes cost mebbe three cents on the dollar; and that's all right. But revenue costs a dollar and ten cents on twenty cents' worth o' liquor; and that's robbin' the people with a gun to their faces.

"Whiskey means more to us mountain folks than hit does to folks in town, whar thar's drug-stores and doctors. Let ary thing go wrong in the fam'ly-fever, or snake bite, or somethin'-and we can't git a doctor up hyar less'n three days; and it costs scand'lous.

"Now, yan's my field o' corn. I gather the corn, and shuck hit and grind hit my own self, and the woman she bakes us a pone o' bread to eat-and I don't pay no tax, do I? Then why can't I make some o' my corn into pure whiskey to drink, without payin' tax? I tell you, 'tain't fair, this way the Government does!"

In his chapter on "Ways that are Dark," Mr. Kephart describes the setting up in business of the "blockader," why and how he chooses

the spot, how he obtains his materials, what he does with them when he gets them, with what precautions the place is guarded and in what manner the finished product is disposed of. The maker of "blockade liquor," as illicit whiskey is called by the natives, has never heard of the Pure Food and Drugs Act. The author says, "A's for purity, all the moonshine whiskey used to be pure, and much of it still is; but every blockader knows how to adulterate, and when one of them does stoop to such tricks he will stop at no halfway measures. Some add washing lye, both to increase the yield and to give the liquor an artificial bead, then prime this abominable fluid with pepper, ginger, tobacco, or anything else that will make it ́sting."

Once the stuff is made it has to be marketed, if the blockader is to secure the results of his honest toil, for so he considers it; but the sale of it is fraught with quite as much danger as its manufacture, and just as much secrecy is necessary.

In the chapter "A Leaf from the Past" the lineage of the inhabitants of the Southern Appalachians is traced. The original settlers were from Ireland, they settled first in Western Pennsylvania, then drifted down into Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina. The famous Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 is a leaf in the moonshiner's history. Like the poor, the moonshiner has always been with us, but it was not until about 1876 that our Government began in dead earnest to fight him. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue in his report of 1876-77 called attention to the illicit manufacture of whiskey in the mountain counties of the South and urged vigorous measures for its immediate suppression. Again in 1878 the Commissioner writes: "It is with extreme regret, I find it my duty to report the great difficulties that have been and still are encountered in many of the Southern States in the enforcement of the laws. In the mountain regions of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, and in some portions of Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, the illicit manufacture of spirits has been carried on for a number of years, and I am satisfied that the annual loss to the Government from this source has been very nearly, if not quite, equal to the annual appropriation for the collection of the internal revenue tax throughout the whole country." The authorities are still fighting with the question and-the moonshiners!

Recently, however, a new factor has entered the moonshining problem and profoundly altered it, namely prohibition, and it is one of those anomalies of life that the "blockader," himself an outlaw is

strongly in favor of the strict enforcement of the prohibitory, law. The reason is, of course, simple enough. The mountaineer has not studied the principles of government; such names as Lecky, Lilly, Mills, etc., are unknown to him; he is in ignorance of the fundamental basis of law-making in organized society, but he does know that prohibition doesn't prohibit, though he may not use that term to express the idea. And he knows that under prohibitory laws his onc gallon of blockade liquor grows into two or three gallons through no arduous effort of his own, but by the simple addition of cologne spirits or some similar adulterant.

Theoretical knowledge is one thing, practical knowledge another. It would be impossible for the blockader to formulate the theorem that prohibition doesn't prohibit, but he can prove it in a practical way, without any difficulty and he does it every time he peddles out his gallon of "blockade," watered to half-strength, then fortified with cologne spirits, for a $1.50 a quart in villages and lumber camps where somebody always has a thirst and can find the coin to assuage it. Until prohibition came to the mountains blockade whiskey sold for from $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon-and the most of it was unadulterated. "Under prohibition it is a fact," comments the author, "that blockading as a business conducted in armed defiance. of the law is increasing by leaps and bounds since the mountain region went dry. The profits today are much greater than before, because liquor is harder to get, in country districts, and consumers will pay higher prices without question." He holds no brief against prohibition, and would solve the question of illicit distilling as an economic and not as a moral problem.

THE DRINK QUESTION, by the REV. JOSEPH KEATING, S. J., is one in the series of manuals edited by the Catholic School Guild in England. (P. S. King & Son, London.) The book is "an attempt to give a clear analysis of that vast sociological problem, the Drink Question, and to state to what extent and in what way Catholic principles are concerned in its solution." The author quotes somewhat extensively from some of the prominent prohibition authorities, such as Horsley and Sturge, Sullivan, Reid, Kelynack, but is by no means willing to travel the same road as they and differs from them in his conclusions. The book is manifestly an argument for True Temperance, but not for Prohibition. The author would not underrate the importance of the Drink Problem, but believes that it "is not the most fundamental problem with

which modern civilization is faced. It is true that excessive drinking intensifies all the other evils we deplore, but it is not the cause of them all. Sweating, bad housing, insufficient food, imperfect education, excessive facilities for excess, adulterated liquor evenall the dehumanizing elements that disgrace our industrial system, enter essentially into the Drink Question, and the remedies for all, to be effectual, must be sought simultaneously."

He reviews the history of liquor legislation in England and calls attention to two important factors in legislating upon this Problem, first-that legislation in violent opposition to public opinion, if unsupported by other influences, is apt to miss its object, and even to produce worse disorder; the second, that legislation, judiciously framed and carefully applied, can do much to rectify public morals. The efficiency of a law depends upon the willingness of the community as a whole to obey it; if the whole community rejects a particular law, there is no means of enforcing it: it becomes a dead letter. And the difficulty of enforcing a particular law will obviously vary with the number and influence of those who resist it. Laws regulating the consumption of alcoholic liquor are necessarily of a restrictive character, and if they are to win acceptance, they must either recommend themselves by their reasonableness or be backed by an adequate force.

The attitude of the Catholic Church upon the question in the abstract, and the methods of teaching temperance principles is clearly stated in the chapter “Ethics of the Question." While the Church holds that drunkenness is one of the seven deadly sins,

"She has expressly prohibited Catholics joining the 'Sons of Temperance' in the United States and the 'Good Templars,' 'Rechabites' and similar societies in the British Isles, because she cannot wholly approve of the motives of these zealous reformers, nor has she any guarantee of the soundness of their methods. And even when the Temperance cause is dissociated from any specifically religious propaganda, this does not make it altogether unobjectionable from the Catholic point of view. For in such a case the merely natural virtue of temperance is thrust up into an unnatural prominence and its cultivation tends to be made a religion, either of itself or in combination with those other bugbears of ultra-Puritanism, betting, smoking, card-playing and theatre-going."

The author feels very strongly that the solution of the Drink Question is not in Prohibition. Evil as are the effects of strong