The way once opened, all will flock in. Divines, statesmen, moralists and financiers will all strike for the new placer. The moral reformers will brandish aloft the tinkling weapon, enthusiastic in their determination to use it to the utmost and bring down tippling to a minimum. Lawmakers and tax-gatherers will rejoice over a new and fertile source of revenue, and pile upon it impost on impost, secure of the approval of the most grumbling of tax-payers. To the new fiscal and moral California all will flock. The extent of the revolution is as little to be estimated in advance as was that caused by Columbus's voyage. Strong drink pervades all civilized lands. It is a universal element, the elimination of which must produce changes impossible to be calculated or foreseen. Should the grand moral results anticipated follow, the difference between civilized man and his sober savage fellow will be widened. Progress will no longer be handicapped, and will press forward with accelerated speed. Its path will cease to be strewn with broken fortunes, happiness and bottles. Policemen and criminal courts will lose, according to standard statistics, four-fifths of their occupation. In that proportion the cause of virtue will gain. Mankind will be four hundred per cent. more honest and peaceable than before the passage of the whisky-punch bill. With the public treasury full, and the detective, the juryman and the shyster existent only in a fossil state, the millennium will have been, as the phrase runs, discounted. But we run foul of the inevitable and inexorable _If_. Is the machine invented that is to do such work? Is it within the reach of any combination of springs, ratchets and clappers? Is the leviathan of strong drink to be hooked after that fashion--a bit put in his mouth and the monster made to draw the car of state? We shall see. The end would justify much more ponderous and hazardous means, and the chance is worth taking. Independent of the general blessing to mankind involved in the punch idea, Virginia proposes in it a special benefit to herself; and that of course is her chief motive. States so very much in debt as she is are not prone to quixotic philanthropy. Should this novel form of taxation assist in paying the interest on her bonds, she will patiently wait for the secondary, if broader, good accruing to the world at large. Men, she argues, who are able to indulge in stimulants are able to pay their debts, and at least their share of the public debt. Each click of the bell proclaims her adoption of this theory, and at the same time her anxiety to find some means of satisfying her creditors. If she can cancel at once her bonds and Barleycorn, so much the better. E. B. THE NAUTCH-DANCERS OF INDIA.