Progress is to be hoped for only from the most careful analysis of all the factors of this problem; yet, instead, the nation leaves it to the unthinking, emotional part of the population. In the years of the silver agitation it was a matter of admiration to any foreigner, the wonderful seriousness with which large crowds listened in a hundred towns, evening after evening, to long hours of difficult technical discussion on currency; sixteen to one was really discussed by the whole nation, and arguments were arrayed against arguments before a decision was reached. Is it necessary that the opposite method be taken as soon as this problem is touched--a question far more complex and difficult than the silver question, and of far more import to the moral habits and the development of the nation? When leading scholars bring real arguments on both sides of the problem, their work is buried in archives, and no one is moved to action. But when a Chicago minister hangs the American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large patch of black color on it, declares that the patch stands for the liquor evil which smirches the country, denounces wildly the men who spend for whiskey the money which ought to buy medicine for sick children, and then madly tears the black cloth from the stars and stripes and grinds it under his heel--then thousands rush out as excited as if they had heard a convincing argument. And this superficiality is the more repellent because every glimpse below the surface shows an abundance of cant and hypocrisy and search for cheap fame and sensationalism and still more selfish motives mingled with the whole movement; even the agitation itself, with its threats of ruin, borders too often on graft and blackmail and thus helps to debauch the public life. _Alcohol and the Brain_ Those who seriously study, not merely the one or the other symptom, but the whole situation, can hardly doubt that the demand of true civilization is for temperance and not for abstinence, and that complete prohibition must in the long run work against real temperance. But nothing is more characteristic of the hysterical caprice of the masses than the constant neglect of this distinction. Even the smallest dose of alcohol is for them nothing but evil, and triumphantly they seize on isolated statements of physiologists who acknowledge that every dose of alcohol has a certain influence on the brain. This is at once given the turn that every glass of beer or wine "muddles" the brain and is therefore a sin against the freedom of man.