with an established custom let the carcasses rot in the open fields till the progress of putrefaction filled the land with horror and pestilence; if moreover, among the crowd of victims we should recognize the milch cows of thousands of poor families whose children were wan with hunger, and if furthermore the intelligent rulers of that nation should supervise the ceremonies of the sacrifice, distribute the carcasses and calmly collect statistics to ascertain the percentage of the resultant mortality? The LOSS OF LIFE caused by the ravages of the alcohol plague equals the result of a perennial war. The most belligerent nation of modern times, the Russians, with the perpetual skirmishes on their eastern frontier, and their periodical campaigns against their southern neighbors, lose in battle a yearly average of 7,000 men. The average longevity of the Caucasian nations is nearly 38 years. Of their picked men about 45 years. The average age of a soldier is now-a-days about 25 years. The death of 7,000 soldiers represents therefore a national loss of 7,000 times the difference between 25 and 45 years, _i. e._, a total waste of 140,000 years. Medical statistics show that in the United States alone the direct consequences of intoxication cost every year the lives of six thousand persons, most of them reckless young drunkards, who thus anticipate the natural term of their lives by about twenty years. But at the very least, two per cent. of our population is addicted to the constant use of some form of alcoholic liquors. Prof. Neison, of the British General Life Insurance Company, estimates that rum-drinkers shorten their lives by seven years, beer-drinkers by five and one-half, and “mixed drinkers” by nine and one-half years. For the city of London, Sir H. Thompson computes that drinkers of all classes shorten their lives by six years. But let us be quite sure to keep within the limits of facts applying to all conditions of life, and assume a minimum of four years. A total of 4,120,000 years for the population of the United States is therefore a moderate estimate of the annual life waste by the consequences of the poison vice! In other words, in a country of by no means exceptionally hard drinkers, alcohol destroys yearly thirty times as much life as the warfare of the most warlike nation on earth. The first year of the war for the preservation of the Union and the suppression of slavery cost us 82,000 lives. When the death list had reached a total of 100,000 the clamors for peace became so importunate that the representatives of our nation were several times on the point of abandoning the cause of the most righteous war ever waged. Yet the far larger life waste on the altar of the Poison-Moloch continues year after year, and for a small bribe not a few of our prominent politicians seem willing to perpetuate that curse to the end of time. Among all the nations of the Christian world, with the only exception of the Syrian Maronites,[4] the poison vice