Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legislative measures whatever. For years to come 20 per cent. of the aggregate would undoubtedly be devoured by liquor venders finding means to elude the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent. would be spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent. more would probably be wasted for frivolous purposes—innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison traffic, but still on the whole amounting to a loss of national resources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent. could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With five billion dollars we could construct ten bridges over every one of our hundred largest rivers. We could build an international railroad of a gauge that would enable the denizens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics in twenty-four hours. We could realize Professor Lexow’s project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal railways connecting the centers of commerce with the suburban homes of the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attractive enough to drain the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the grog-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recreation; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnastics and zoölogical attractions for the summer season, and reading rooms with picture galleries and musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country. We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line our highways with shade trees; we could plant forest trees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a free public library; we could help the sick by teaching them to avoid the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime; we could teach our homeless vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cities. And moreover, we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of a National Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and political economists, for the training of temperance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture halls in every larger city of the country.