1930 The Saloon in the Home

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 ]