When high license prevailed in Hillsboro you had a dozen saloons, each contributing to the revenues of the state, the country, the municipality and the school fund. You voted local option in, and now you've thirty-two unlicensed and unregulated doggeries selling rot-gut to schoolboys and contributing not one cent to the public revenues. The cost of your courts has increased, drunkenness was never so common, brawls never so frequent. It is said that even fools can learn in the bitter school of experience; but there be idiots upon whom even such lessons are lost. But you say, "Vote local option in again and we'll elect officers who will enforce the laws." Have you yet to learn that a law cannot be enforced that is not steadily upheld by public opinion? And do you not know that there's not a considerable town in Texas where public opinion demands at all times a strict enforcement of such a law? If you really desire to have a sober city, raise a purse and hire the operators of your blind tigers to place their booze on the sidewalk in buckets, accompanied by tin dippers and signs, "Help yourself--funerals furnished free." Men would then run away from the very smell of the stuff who now sneak up dirty alleys and pay 15 cents for the privilege of poisoning themselves. On the same principle some men--and they are not all anti-Prohibs either--will leave a beautiful and charming wife to mope at home while they are flirting with some female whose face would frighten a freight-train. Man is just like a dog--only more so. Perhaps a marauding old muley cow would be a better comparison. A muley cow will eat anything on this majestic earth that she can steal, from a hickory shirt to a Prohibition newspaper, and if she can't get it through her neck she will chew it and suck the juice. That's human nature to a hair. Man values most what is hardest to get. And until you reverse the law of nature the legitimate effect of Prohibition will be blind tigers and back-door sneaks, the breeding of spies and the sale and consumption of an infinitely meaner brand of booze.