America is pre-eminently the land of legislative experiments; and it has unequalled facilities for giving trial, with comparatively little risk, to many of the professed solutions of those problems which the artificial life of civilised society has produced. On nothing has it made more numerous or varied experiments than on efforts to promote sobriety by law. Each State in the Union is free, within certain limits, to regulate or suppress the liquor traffic within its own borders, without interference from the Federal Government. The latter body, however, maintains freedom of inter-State traffic, and has the power to tax liquor, and to impose internal revenue fees on brewers and saloon keepers. These fees are most strictly enforced; and the first thing a man does who contemplates entering the drink trade, whether legally or illegally, is to take out his internal revenue licence. Even the individual who surreptitiously sells half a dozen bottles of whisky a month in the lowest "speak-easy" rarely thinks of attempting to evade the Federal revenue law; for conviction is so sure, and the penalties are so heavy, that it does not pay. In seeking to learn what lessons can be taught to old-world politicians from the new-world experiments, it must be borne in mind that, although the Americans are mostly of one blood with ourselves, the conditions of their social and political life are yet very different. The liquor problem occupies a far more prominent place there than at home, and the saloon keeper is an influential force in State, Union, and City politics. The temperance element is strong and active, and exercises a social influence not easy to estimate. A solid public sentiment has been created against even the moderate use of intoxicants; personal abstinence is advocated as part of the routine in nearly all the public elementary schools; it is regarded as disreputable for a man to frequent saloons; and, except under very extraordinary circumstances, no respectable woman would think of crossing their doorsteps. Many employers of labour, especially railway companies, go so far as to insist that their hands shall be abstainers. But while the work of the teetotalers has been productive of much socially, their political work has been far more spasmodic, and less effective. They are split into cliques; and whatever proposal may be brought forward, there is almost certain to be a body of irreconcilables who fight against it. In America, as in other countries, the greatest opponents of temperance legislation are always temperance reformers: if a law is moderate, then it incurs the enmity of those who believe that any other plan than the utter and immediate destruction of the saloon is sin; if it satisfies the extremists, it is opposed by those who declare that such uncompromising legislation will produce a reaction, and so in the end do more harm than good. A still greater cause of weakness than even