As a family, one trait which we have in common is intemperance, though Sister is less so than the rest of us. My father would be surprised to be charged with intemperance, for all his life he has waged war against intemperance (in its restricted sense--the excessive use of strong drink); but he has been intemperate in his zeal for the “Cause of Temperance.” I remember the “Temperance Movement” in our village, in my early childhood. Mother and other women went around to the saloons praying and singing and beseeching the liquor dealers to close out their business. I have heard them tell that when one obdurate man finally yielded (pouring barrels of liquor into the street) there was such rejoicing that staid citizens like my father threw their hats in the air and shouted for joy. This was years before Father left the Republican Party to espouse the cause of Prohibition--perhaps long before there was a Prohibition Party. Of course the reform wave subsided, the liquor dealers bought more whisky, and the curse continued. But although that early warfare died out, Father’s zeal, I might almost say his fanaticism, has ever been unceasingly directed toward efforts to quell the liquor traffic. So it was not surprising that, in time, ardent Republican though he was, he allied himself to the party bent on fighting this evil. It is sad to think of him expending energy on what seems to me a lost cause; but Prohibition is no lost cause for him.[3] Logical and clear-sighted as he is, he seems to me to take a one-sided view in this matter, and to be following a chimera. He says Prohibition will yet prevail, whereas I feel that the prohibition--the inhibition--must be in the individual himself. The long years of character-building determine whether one shall succeed or fail. Legislative measures, I fear, can never be effective for those suffering from ingrained weakness, and dragged down by tyrannical habits. But Father firmly believes that the good time is coming toward which he labours unceasingly.