My village gossips tell me that fermentation will stop of itself when I draw the wine off the lye; but the French practice certainly seems to be to burn sulphur matches in the vat and so kill the vinegar germs there latent.  And then platrage?  You sprinkle the must with plaster of Paris before fermentation begins.  Is that done in England?  It is not done in this part of England at least.  Nor do I know why it is done in France.  Probably before I have solved my problems by stomach-ache and other experiences of a biliary kind, prohibition will be in the air over here, wafted upon some newspaper breeze from America.  There will be no difficulty in starting a fermentation out of that sweeping doctrine, that’s for certain.  I don’t say that we need take prohibition seriously; but we think about it, naturally, and talk about it out here.

If it were put to the local vote in this village, it would be lost.  We have many total abstainers, yet one of them, I know, and several of them, I believe, would vote against it.  Says the one I am sure of:  “If I abstain from strong drink, as I do, it is my own doing; and if I were tempted to a fall and withstood it, that is to my credit.  But if the law cuts me off it, and I am a criminal if I drink, it cuts me off a good part of my credit too—­and I am against that.”  My friend has there put his finger upon a sharp little dilemma.  If alcohol is a bad thing, then prohibition is a good thing.  But if temperance is a good thing, then prohibition is a bad thing.  You cannot be temperate in the use of alcohol if you have none.  Nor is sobriety a virtue in you if you lock up the wine-cellar and throw the keys down the well.  Very well; then will you do without alcohol or without temperance?  There is the choice; and I have made mine.

Besides, we are all for liberty down here, individualists to a man.  Give us a loophole to avoid compulsion and we use it.  One of the most frequently exercised of my magisterial functions is to certify conscientious objections to the Vaccination Act.  I do it against the grain.  A doctor told me the other day that he believed smallpox had reached the end of its tether, and was on the ebb.  I am sure I hope so, lest there should be one day a bad outbreak among these liberty men.  I must have signed away the chances of hundreds of children, who, by the way, are not of an age to consent.  I never fail to point out the risk; but the Court awards it and the law allows it; so I sign.

There is much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all in the concrete.  Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw, rough and ready.  In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe primrose, will “forsaken die.”  He will rend the Labour party in twain from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop off his industrials just as it had begun to adhere to them.  I know the peasantry.  They will never strike for political ends, for though they are not quick to see the consequences of hypothetical actions, they do see that if you make Parliamentary government impossible you make a Labour majority not worth having.