Brooklyn, favored “moderation in drinking and total abstinence from treating.” He said he never drank beer until he was sixty years old, after which time he became fond of it, and evidently believed that its use is a means to temperance for the people. There are many who might say nearly the same thing. We are learning to appreciate malt drinks and the tendency is unmistakable, although it must be admitted that, on the whole, the disposition of the people is, as yet, more nearly like that of the Celt than the Teuton. Mr. W. A. Lawrence of Waterville, N. Y., in a paper chiefly devoted to facts respecting the growth of hops, thus speaks of the general question—beer _versus_ whisky: “The fact is that the quality of beer, as a light and refreshing drink, has been wonderfully improved within the past few years. A bottle of beer to-day has but about half the strength of the beer of twenty years ago, and half the strength of ordinary wine and cider. The beer of to-day is just what the American people want—a cool, mildly refreshing, stimulating and palatable drink. Wine is too expensive for a common drink. Cider is too sour and strong. Whisky is not a drink at all but a drug, and you have to take water after it as you do after taking other drugs, and it ought to be kept in a drug-store for sale and nowhere else. But beer is not only agreeable and refreshing and cheap, but it is mild, and generally peaceful and good-humored in its effects. It is true a man can get drunk on it, but a man won’t. A hog may, but most beer-drinkers are not hogs, but hard-working men who know what they want and what fills the bill, and if they wanted to get drunk they would drink whisky and get a good deal bigger drunk at less expense and in half the time. “The great majority of the beer-drinkers in America are these same hard-working men and women, who also drink beer with their food as we all do our tea and coffee. But in addition to these, who are mostly our German citizens, there are thousands of men, old Americans, who have learned to love beer, who will drink it as long as they live and will live the longer for drinking it. It is among the native Americans that the demand for beer and hops is increasing. The Germans always did drink for fifteen generations back, as much as they could hold, and in spite of all the theories of our anti-beer, total abstinence friends, the Germans in Germany and in this country seem to be still above ground; and so far as this country is concerned, as myself, an American citizen, and the son of American ancestry for five generations back, I wish to God we could trade off about two millions of native American whisky-drinkers now in the “solid South,” for two millions of hard-working Germans who would do their own work, and drink their own beer, and keep clear of fights and strikes and riots and greenback conventions, as they keep clear of them here in the North to-day.