Unless they penetrate into the soul of these avenues, unless they perceive that these avenues are not spiritually different from Main Street, though they may be clothed in the habiliments of metropolitan taste and fancy, they will fail to symbolize correctly America. They will be writing merely for money and controversial space in the literary supplements. For the soul of these avenues is a soul with an _i_ substituted for _u_. It is the soul of the land. It is a homely, wholesome provincialism, typifying human nature as it is found throughout the United States. We may herd in a large centre of population, assume the superficialities of cosmopolitan culture and genuinely believe ourselves devils of fellows. It takes all the force of a prohibition law to make us realize that we are more sinned against than sinning. Then are we confronted sharply by the fact that the herd is appallingly inefficient and inarticulate in a conflict with isolated individualism. The prohibition movement originated in farming communities and villages where the evils of alcohol are ridiculously insignificant. No self-respecting or neighbour-respecting villager could afford to be known as a drinking man. His business or his livelihood was at stake. Then why did he foster prohibition? Why did he seek to fasten it upon the city resident who, if he drank, did not lose apparently his own or his neighbour’s respect? Chiefly because of his very isolation. Because he was geographically deprived of the enjoyments which the city man shared. I can well imagine a farmer in the long sweating hours of harvest time or a small town storekeeper forced to currying favour with his friends and neighbours 365 days in a year, resolutely declaring that what he cannot have the man in the city shall not have. The hatching of all kinds of prohibitory plots can be traced to just such apparent injustices of life. Dr. Freud would correctly explain it under the heading of inferiority-complex. City men have marvelled at the remarkable organization of the reformers. It is not so much organization, however, as it is a national feeling perceived and expressed simultaneously. Cities may conduct the most efficient propaganda against such a feeling, they may assemble their largest voting strength to assail it. All in vain. The country districts roll up the majorities and the cities are left unmistakably high and dry.