teachers may properly aid the influence of home-life and homeeducation upon the character of children.

Chancellor VON STEIGER'S reply to Messrs. Hill and Williams is of the utmost significance, coming, as it does, from a former clergyman, now holding a high administrative office under a Republican form of government, and an ardent advocate of true temperance. "Evidently," he said, "the proposition of Mr. Rowland Hill is based on the assumption that 'total abstinence' is the great ideal, to which mankind should aspire. This, however, does not harmonize even with the views of Rev. Rochat, who, in reporting on the work of the 'Swiss Legion of the Blue Cross,' told us that total abstinence is recommended by them only as a necessary means for reclaiming those who had fallen completely under the dominion of the vice of drunkenness. The ideal which we endeavor to place before our young folks is somewhat different from Mr. Hill's. We do not wish to educate our children to despise a precious gift of God; rather would we teach them to use in moderation, thankfully and reverently, every gift which God places within our reach. Should the blood of the grape be represented as something pernicious and damnable in itself? Will we not be doing our duty if we teach our children temperance and moderation— teach them that true virtue consists in self-control, in selfdenial, in a proper mastery of the mind over all passions? We should strive to make our children strong in body and mind-strong enough to undertake the struggle for life, to face the evils of the world, and yet remain virtuous. Our children should be 'welttüchtig,' not 'weltflüchtig."" These words remind one strongly of what the immortal John Milton said of temperance :-*

How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing of so great a trust, without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanor of every grown man. And when He, himself, tabled the Jews from Heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of

* In his plea for unlicensed printing.

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him, and, therefore, defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser. There were but little work left for preaching if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. * It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And, perhaps, this is that doom that Adam fell into of knowing good and evil; that is to say, of knowing good by evil.

As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmet through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see, and know, and yet abstain.

Dr. DRYSDALE evidently believed that he said something very startling when he styled wine a gift of the devil, rather than of God; and then illustrated his assertion, that one could live and grow old without wine, by citing the age of the French chemist Chevreul, who never tasted a drop of alcohol.

Mr. CAUDERLIER replied, that the illustration amounted to nothing in this discussion. He could offset it by an opposite example from his own closest observation, seeing that his grandmother reached the age of 98 years, and for the last forty years of her life never tasted a drop of water-her usual beverages being, of course, of an alcoholic nature.

Rev. BOVET sided with von Steiger; but two students, one an atheist named KLEIN, the other an anarchist named STERN (the latter of whom was somewhat unpleasantly, perhaps undeservedly, mentioned in connection with the operations of the "Red Hand" in New York, and since then implicated in a

number of similar affairs), sided with Mr. Hill. Mr. Stern declared that modern exegesis had proved that the wine made by Christ was not wine, but simply juice of the grape.*

Mr. W. MILLIET deprecated the attempt to divert the schools from their legitimate purposes, especially in the manner proposed, which would make science subservient to ignorance and prejudice, since children were to be taught that use and abuse are synonymous-that wine, beer, cider and whiskey are all one and the same thing. His sledge-hammer arguments and their statistical supports should be widely circulated. He said:

"I heard it said here, this morning, that one ounce of experience is worth a hundred-weight of theory. Well, what does experience teach us? It teaches us that there is a vast difference between the effects of wine, beer and cider on the one hand, and of distilled liquors on the other. Take France, as an example, and trace there the effects of alcohol. If you examine the number of punished drunkards, of accidents, of suicides, of cases of insanity and crimes, you will find a pronounced difference between the departments in which wine is raised and used, and those in which distilled liquor is the common drink. The same is true of Switzerland. In cantons using cider, alcoholism in the medical and the general sense is totally unknown. There are cantons in which much wine, much cider and much beer is drunk, yet even there a drunken man is so rare a sight, that he is stared at and hooted. † In view of these facts, it would be dangerous to place into the hands of

*Rev. Dr. E. H. Jewett and Rev. J. R. Sikes have but recently shown in a most conclusive manner, that the drink which intoxicated Noah, was the drink used as an offering to God; the drink which our Saviour, whom his enemies called a wine-bibber, used, and on one occasion made out of water. Even the Puritans styled wine and beer "good creatures of God," and it was only in recent years, when blasphemy and ignorance combined to falsify, not only the sum of human experience and knowledge, but also the Holy Book, that men disgracing the cloth, dared to advance the absurd etymological quibble that yayin was wine when disapprovingly spoken of in the Bible, but simply must, when recommended for use. On a former occasion the writer ridiculed the silly quibblers by citing these lines from "Butler's Hudibras

:

For Hebrew roots, although they're found

To flourish most on barren ground,
They had such plenty as sufficed

To make some think them circumcised.

This was a mistake, which I readily acknowledge, seeing that Dr. Jewett has proved that these learned irreverents know neither Hebrew nor Greek.

+ It must be borne in mind that Mr. Milliet was the Chief of the Swiss Bureau of Statistics, and speaks as an authority on this subject, which he has made a special study.

our young folks, books in which the error is propagated that the use of intoxicants is harmful in every form, and should be shunned as a work of the devil. I have seen such books, and am constrained to say that they do not in all things harmonize with the actual state of affairs.

"In fact, any one who is at all familiar with temperance literature cannot but wonder at the great number of errors which have crept into it. An erroneous statement, once published, passes from author to author, from book to book, from generation to generation, without being questioned. Thus, for example, an error to which Dr. Bunge has given currency in one of his later works, turns up in every book on the subject. It is the assertion, copied from Dr. Baer's celebrated book on alcoholism, that in Germany 40 per cent. of all crimes are traceable to intoxication. The inquiries upon which this allegation is based, simply showed what proportion of the prisoners, confined in German penal institutions, used intoxicants, habitually or occasionally. * * * Similar errors are being circulated in great numbers, and in the books you propose they would be perpetuated, transmitted from father to son, from generation to generation. In educating youth, we should, above all things, avoid falsehood and errors. We should distinguish between use and abuse. * Everything that is unnecessary is not necessarily superfluous. Our whole civilization, all our progress, is virtually nothing more than the multiplication of our needs, a constant increase in the use of things that are not necessary. We, in Switzerland, are of opinion that wine and beer supply a social, though not absolutely necessary, want; and it is for this reason that we have torn down the wall of import duties which has hitherto kept these beverages out of cantons, in which they are not produced. Thus we hope to drive out ardent spirits and substitute fermented drinks for them. If you should submit to our people the question, whether they prefer total abstinence to a moderate use of wine and beer, you would most assuredly receive an answer which I might express, by citing the lines of the poet :*

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Ay, he who is so strong that he shall pass
Through life without a wish, renouncing all,

May with the salamander live in fire,

Preserving pure in that pure element

His stainless soul. Me, Nature, when she made me,
Compounded of more coarse and common clay :

Earth draws me still with earth's desires and joys."

*Schiller: "The Death of Wallenstein," Act ii. Scene 2. Coleridge omits the lines. The above translation is by Stuart Sterne.

Prof. Dr. BUNGE admitted the error with which Mr. Milliet charged him. He believed, however, that total abstinence should become the rule. He pointed to America and England (!), whose examples Germany and Austria should emulate. The Professor, of course, derived his information concerning the blessings of prohibition in America from temperance publications, whose pages teem with a multitude of just such falsehoods and errors as Dr. Bunge admitted to have circulated in his own work.

Professor HERTZEN, of Lausanne, who had lived twenty-five years in Italy, principally in Tuscany, narrated his experiences in that country, which confirmed him in the conviction that fermented liquors should be recommended for use. The Italian workmen, he said, drink a great deal of their excellent native wine; but during the twenty-five years which I spent in Italy, I never saw more than three or four intoxicated persons. Undoubtedly the prisons in Italy hold as many criminals as those of any other country, Russia included, where almost no fermented beverages are used; but this only proves that other causes, besides intoxication, are at the bottom of crime.

A few other remarks, alike unimportant in point of theory and of fact, closed this singularly unequal contest, in which the apostles of prejudice and ignorance were signally discomfited. That it resulted in this manner, is all the more satisfactory, because no American was present to take part in it, and to show that the conclusions which Mr. Milliet and other specialists arrived at from their own studies and observations, are fully sustained by American scientists who have the courage of their convictions. The Popular Science Monthly, some time ago, criticised severely the errors and falsehoods propagated under the protectorate of the W. C. T. U.

Two years before the Zürich Congress was held, the United States Brewers' Association, in one of its annual reports, characterized the work of these organizations in these words:

The mere introduction of text books on hygiene into our public schools, and the spreading of proper views on the abuse of alcohol, would probably find no objectors among the liberal brewers-nay, they would concur in and assist such an educational movement. It is evident, however, from the ac