It has not one redeeming feature; but so carefully has it sheltered itself by a devil-fish organization that it stands like a Gibraltar. It has become so great that the actual investments in the business aggregate billions; an army larger than the combined forces, North and South, at any one time during the Civil War are being supported; over one hundred millions go annually into the national exchequer. China has been called a sleeping giant; woe to the nations once she is awakened. In the liquor traffic we have a giant that never sleeps. Twenty-four hours each day--like Giant Despair--he enslaves and imprisons the multitudes. So tremendous has this organization grown that its work does not stop with social demoralization, but with little difficulty can dictate governmental policies, throttle legislation, and bribe juries. Again, we cannot judge or estimate the liquor traffic until we follow it down through its labyrinth of social, financial, and moral declension. Not until we see it face to face, glaring and defiant, in the haunts where finished products are on exhibition. The "Scarlet Annex," temples of lust, and the White Slaver's headquarters are united in the place where labour troubles are hatched, mob violence gathers fuel, and feud hatred is crystallized into bloodshed. Where gamblers, thugs, yeggmen, murderers, anarchists, jail-birds, and burglars hold high carnival. We must see the bloated faces, the bleeding Magdalenas, human beasts, and wife beaters, as they wallow in filth and obscenity, before the perspective is correct. The inauguration of liquor as a duplicate for God's greatest manifestation of Himself--the infilling of the Holy Spirit--was a master stroke. In a wild, reckless debauch it supplements man's every need and hunger. In the crazed brain there is a vision of wealth, power, revenge, joy. The drunkard is clay in the liquor-demon's hand; if a coward, liquor makes him bold; if sympathetic, liquor deadens his heart; if honest, liquor makes him a thief; if a loving father or son, liquor makes him a brute. Behold the Handmaiden of the Devil--King Alcohol: the most efficient ally of the "angel of the bottomless pit." XXV THE ASTUTE AUTHOR "Till I come give heed to reading."--_1 Timothy iv. 13._ "Of the making of books there is no end."--_Ecclesiastes xii. 12._ When we remember the crude methods of book making in the days of Solomon, compared with the facilities of modern publishing houses, his statement has in it a touch of humour. To-day manuscripts are turned over to printers and binders, and in two weeks an edition of from five to fifty thousand copies are ready for the market. There are three million volumes in our libraries; and, a writer has said, enough new books come from the press annually to build a pyramid as large as St. Paul's Cathedral, London. Mr. Carnegie is planting his libraries in every town and city in America.