Before the change which has recently befallen the chief German watering-places, Baden--or, as it was more commonly called, Baden-Baden--was the most frequented, the most brilliant and the most profitable "hell" in Europe. Its baths and medicinal waters were a mere excuse for the coming thither of a small number of the vast concourse which annually filled its hotels. In any case, they sank into comparatively utter insignificance. It was not for water--at least not for the waters of any other stream than that of Pactolus--that the world came to Baden. Of course, the sums realized by the keepers of the hell were enormous; and they found it to be their interest to do all that contributed to make the place attractive on a liberal scale. Gardens, parks, miles of woodland walks admirably kept, excellent music in great abundance, vast salons for dancing, for concerts, for reading-rooms, for billiard-rooms, etc.--all as magnificent as carving and gilding and velvet and satin could make them--were provided gratuitously, not for those only who played at the tables, but for all those who would put themselves within reach of the temptation to do so. And this liberal policy was found to answer abundantly. Very many of the water-cure places in the smaller states of Germany had their hells also, and did as Baden did, on a more modest scale. Then came the German unification and the great uprising of a German national consciousness. And German national feeling said that this scandal should no longer exist. A certain delay was rendered necessary by the contracts which were running between the different small governments and the keepers of the gambling-tables. But it was decreed that when the two or three years which were required for these to run out should be at an end, they should not be renewed. It was a serious resolution to take, for some half dozen or so of these little pleasure-towns believed, not without good reason, that the measure would be at once fatal to their prosperity and well-nigh to their existence. And of course there were not wanting large numbers of people who argued that the step was a quixotic one, as needless and fallacious in a moral point of view as fatal on the side of economic considerations. Could it be maintained that the governments in question had any moral duty in the matter save as regarded the lives and habits of their own people? And these were not imperilled by the existence of the gambling-tables. For it was notorious that each of these ducal and grand-ducal patrons of the blind goddess strictly forbade their own subjects to enter the door of the play-saloons. And as to those who resorted to them, and supplied the abundant flow of gold that enriched the whole of each little state, could it be supposed that any one of these gamblers would be reformed or saved from the consequences of his vice by the shutting up of these tables? It was difficult to answer this question in the affirmative. No liquor law ever