The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked protests against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the advance from special to general principles is often amazingly slow; and even now the cause of temperance is hampered by the shortsightedness of reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-tree by clipping and hacking its more prominent branches. They would limit prohibition to the more deadly stimulants, not dreaming that the fatal habit is sure to reproduce its fruit from the smallest germs; that the poison-vice, in fact, is infallibly progressive, ever tending to goad the morbid craving of the toper to stronger and stronger poisons or to a constant increase in the quantity of the wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy, from laudanum to morphine, from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of wine to a dozen bottles, from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of the dram-shop. “Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin maxim of deep significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant vice may be resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, all of which might be saved by the total renunciation of all abnormal stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that “abstinence is easier than temperance.” We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be indulged without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing reaction, far outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary exaltation. We must teach them that the artifice by which the toper hopes to cheat Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is under all circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce, even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a glimpse of happiness at all comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance. But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender, we must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must counteract the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming topers, not to the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to temperance gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred concerts” should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and shortening summer days with free museums, picture galleries, swings, ball grounds, and foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will contrive to outbid the devil.