And he adds:  “Notwithstanding all these constant and ever-pressing financial embarrassments, the society has never faltered for one moment, but has gone steadily on doing its appointed work, exploring new fields, and developing both old and new truths and documents and principles, and it stands to-day the strongest and most solid and substantial bulwark against intemperance in the land.”

A MOST IMPORTANT AGENCY.

As the most important of all the agencies now used for the suppression of the liquor traffic, and as the efficient ally of all let us rally to the support of our great publication house and see that it has ampler means for the work in which it is engaged.  There are hundreds of thousands of men and women in our land who are happy and prosperous to-day because of what this society has done in the last twelve years to create a sentiment adverse to the traffic and to the drinking usages of society.  Its work is so silent and unobtrusive in comparison, with that of many other efficient, but more limited instrumentalities, that we are apt to lose sight of its claims, and to fail in giving an adequate support to the very power, which is, in a large measure, the source of power to all the rest.

If we would war successfully with our strong and defiant enemy, we must look to it that the literature of temperance does not languish.  We are not making it half as efficient as it might be.  Here we have a thoroughly organized publication house, with capable and active agents, which, if the means were placed at its disposal, could flood the country with books, pamphlets and tracts by millions every year; and we leave it to struggle with embarrassments, and to halting and crippled work.  This is not well.  Our literature is our right arm in this great conflict, and only in the degree that we strengthen this arm will we be successful in our pursuit of victory.

[Illustration:  FINANCIAL VIEW OF THE LICENSE SYSTEM.

“Whatever revenue license pays the State is fully counterbalanced by the increased cost of jails, poorhouses and police, for which the patient public pays immense taxation.  The moral burdens from the infamous traffic are all additional to the financial.”]

CHAPTER XVII.

LICENSE A FAILURE AND A DISGRACE.

For over two hundred years in this country, and for a much longer period of time in Great Britain and some of the countries of Continental Europe, attempts have been made to protect the people against the evils of intemperance by restrictive liquor laws.  But as these laws were permissive and not prohibitory, the evil was not restrained.  Nay, its larger growth came as the natural consequence of such laws, for they not only gave to a few men in every community the right to live and grow rich by doing all in their power to increase the evil, but threw around them the protection of the State; so leaving the people powerless in their hands.