It is a well-known phenomenon that periods of material prosperity and high wages are fruitful in crime. Probably increased consumption of alcohol in prosperous times is the sole cause of this. There can be no direct connection between wealth and criminality; the bulk of the criminal population is, on the contrary, poor. It would be idle to speculate as to whether the next century will or will not continue to legislate against intoxicants, because it is morally certain that intoxicants will have been legislated out of existence already, without waiting for the period when it would no longer be necessary to abolish them forcibly. For at present, and in the more immediate future, there is no ground whatever for anticipating that the legislative hand will be withheld wherever law-making appears the simplest and most obvious method of getting rid of any crying evil: and there can be no doubt that the abuse of alcohol is an evil of precisely the sort that legislature will be active in suppressing. Some changes in the method of government will have to take place before Parliament can legislate against alcohol: but that it will so legislate before the middle of this century is morally certain. In what country the alcohol law is first likely to be passed is immaterial. Every country which adopts it will thereby assist in forcing the same measure upon other countries, because, with international travel constantly becoming cheaper and more easy, it is certain that numerous people who object to being deprived of stimulants and intoxicants in one country will migrate to others where their appetite can have full play, and will intensify the drink problem in those countries until these, too, are forced, or will think themselves forced, to legislate in self-protection. Thus such laws will become universal. No doubt this condition will be reached gradually, measures of restriction preceding measures of prohibition. But the end will be the same, and it will be forced upon the world as much by the increased evils inflicted by alcohol on nerves increasingly susceptible to its influence, as by any other consideration. Anyone who has taken the trouble to observe the nervous and physical condition of men and women in the average, during even so short a period as the last quarter of a century, must have been impressed by the marked increase of neurotic states, not merely in exceptional individuals, but in all the people. The neurotic temperament is much more adversely affected by alcohol than any other; and we are all growing more neurotic. All the conditions of modern life tend that way: and it is not alcohol alone that will have to go, but all sorts of habit-inducing drugs, such as morphine, cocaine, and the rest, all of which, like alcohol itself, will soon be so restricted in regard to their sale that their abuse will be rendered practically impossible, and their use restricted to a purely medical employment. It is even quite possible,