“Now everybody knows that whisky is full of the devil and that beer is full of humor and good fellowship; and it can hardly fail to rejoice the heart of every good hop-grower to find that in raising hops for beer he is incidentally engaged in the great “temperance movement” of leading men away from bad whisky to good beer. I know this is not what the professional temperance lecturers say, but what do I care what they say? A temperance lecturer is generally a retired whisky drinker and can see snakes in everything, including beer. Or he is a clergyman and has acquired the habit of talking with no one to contradict him and hence is careless of his facts. Or he is a paid professional, and knows that if war is made on whisky alone, whisky would soon be driven to the drug-store and no more temperance lecturers needed or paid for. I do not hesitate to affirm that I know more about beer by experience and contact and study than the whole crowd of temperance lecturers put together. They ‘mean well’ to be sure; and so do I. The difference between us lies in the fact that they don’t know what they are talking about, and I do, because I am personally familiar with something like a thousand breweries in the United States and have peculiar advantages for information. “And I am sick and tired of sitting in churches built by hops, whose clergymen’s salaries are paid by hops, whose congregations live by hops, and that is by beer at first or second hand, and there listening to wholesale denunciations of beer, and even to cold-blooded, cold-water propositions to pass a general United States law making it illegal to manufacture beer anywhere in the country. One hop-grower who paid out over two thousand dollars to the poor women and children of one village last fall for picking hops, got up and left a church where some of this anti-beer nonsense was being aired, but as a general thing a man can talk against beer in a hop church with as little restraint as a missionary to Greenland feels in preaching hell-fire to his shivering congregation. The brewer is far away, and the connection between hops and beer is kept carefully out of sight. But to a carnal mind like mine it does seem a mean trick for a hop-grower to send out a hop-dealer with a flag of truce to the brewers and sell him hops in a friendly way, and meanwhile the hop-grower is lying in ambush behind a stack of hop-poles, ready as soon as his hops are sold to blaze away at the brewer with a prohibition bullet or ballot. I believe there are very few hop-growers who are capable of such meanness as this, but I do believe there are a great many who do not realize the close connection between hops and beer, and to these I say respectfully, as I did two years ago in a prominent hop paper, ‘If you believe beer is a bad thing, plow up your hop-yards and put in corn and potatoes. It is true that somebody may turn the corn and potatoes into whisky, but that is not your fault. Corn and potatoes must be had for food.