not through fanaticism, but by right of leadership.  Through their office they are committed to prohibition.  So opposition to the temperance movement is scattering.  The Anti-Saloon League has organized these leaders into a nation-wide machine.  It sees that they get their weekly paper, instructing them in the tactics whereby local fights have been won.  A subscription financing the State League is taken once a year.  It counts on the regular list of church benevolences.  The state officers come in to help on the critical local fights.  Any country politician fears their non-partisan denunciation as he does political death.  The local machines thus backed are incurable mugwumps, hold the balance of power, work in both parties, and have voted dry the agricultural territory of the United States everywhere, by the township, county, or state unit.

The only institutions that touch the same territory in a similar way are the Chautauquas in the prosperous agricultural centres.  These, too, by the same sign are emphatically anti-saloon in their propaganda, serving to intellectualize and secularize the dry sentiment without taking it out of the agricultural caste.

There is a definite line between our farm-civilization and the rest.  When a county goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county-seat.  Such temperance people as are in the court-house town represent the church-vote, which is even then in goodly proportion a retired-farmer vote.  The larger the county-seat, the larger the non-church-going population and the more stubborn the fight.  The majority of miners and factory workers are on the wet side everywhere.  The irritation caused by the gases in the mines, by the dirty work in the blackness, by the squalor in which the company houses are built, turns men to drink for reaction and lamplight and comradeship.  The similar fevers and exasperations of factory life lead the workers to unstring their tense nerves with liquor.  The habit of snuggling up close in factories, conversing often, bench by bench, machine by machine, inclines them to get together for their pleasures at the bar.  In industrial America there is an anti-saloon minority in moral sympathy with the temperance wave brought in by the farmers.  But they are outstanding groups.  Their leadership seldom dries up a factory town or a mining region, with all the help the Anti-Saloon League can give.

In the big cities the temperance movement is scarcely understood.  The choice residential districts are voted dry for real estate reasons.  The men who do this, drink freely at their own clubs or parties.  The temperance question would be fruitlessly argued to the end of time were it not for the massive agricultural vote rolling and roaring round each metropolis, reawakening the town churches whose vote is a pitiful minority but whose spokesmen are occasionally strident.