It was exceedingly unfortunate for {31} the community that the leaders of the James and Younger gangs were temperate men. Had it not been so, their careers, instead of extending over 20 harassing years, would have been cut short inside of five. Uncontrollable predilection for whisky, and the society of strange women brought about the destruction of nearly all of the band who from time to time were slain by each other’s hands or those of justice. Temperance and chastity in a rascal of any kind mean an immense amount of mischief to the community. Fortunately they are quite rare. {32} THE rapid spread of Prohibition is full of suggestion. The grain fields of Kansas and Texas are periodically devastated by the green bug. When the green bugs are at their worst a parasite appears which sweeps them off, and the wheat growers have a respite. Then, having destroyed their provender, the parasites starve, and the green bugs have a chance to grow again until the parasites overtake them in the hour of their triumph and power. Will the suppression of the alcoholic scavenger allow the criminals and quasi-criminals to multiply like the green bugs? {33} ------ DURING the ages of terrible oppression of the European peoples which culminated in the French Revolution, the main amelioration of the hardships endured was found in the vices of the oppressors. The sword of the duelist, quarreling over women, the picturesque horrors of delirium tremens, and the loathsome mal de Naples continually swept away hecatombs of tyrant lordlings and frequently obliterated whole families. In fact no aristocratic family ever withstood these adverse influences very long. Extinction came as promptly and as certainly as the curculio to the ripening plum. The student of French and English {34} history is continually astonished at the brief time in which noble names remain in view. They rise to dizzy eminence on one page, and on the next go down to oblivion. One rarely finds the name of a century or two ago mentioned in any of the European news of to-day. Mr. Freeman, the eminent English historian, says, conclusively, that in spite of the perennial vaunt of ancestors who “came over with the Conqueror,” and of Tennyson’s musical mendacity about the “daughter of an hundred Earls,” the families who can trace back to even so recent a date as the reign of the Stuarts are very rare. {35} Frequently hundreds of years elapsed before the historic titles were “revived” to gild some parvenu. Since then these families have been kept up only by intermarriages with later parvenus. The royal family itself has been repeatedly on the point of extinction, and the continuity of the line only maintained by extraordinary efforts. ------ IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life {36} from the world, that their room might be had for more acceptable growths.