In the Californian journals even, the vice of drunkenness is not so frequently referred to as in almost any of our newspapers, although the deeds of swindlers, forgers, robbers, and murderers are plainly set forth, and even political shortcomings are visited with severe condemnation. One of the papers[338] recently had a column filled with extracts from Californian newspapers having reference to a gentleman whose political views do not seem to find favour with some of his countrymen. He is a senator, and is spoken of as a “coward” and a “traitor,” and his followers are “law-defying miscreants engaged in diabolical schemes.” “The mob element,” we are told, “is in the ascendancy, communism stalks abroad. Hemp is his” (the senator’s) “stock-in-trade, and a portion of it might be advantageously used to suspend his worthless carcass.” So the reader will observe that drunkenness is not always a necessary concomitant of crime, and that there is a license which is unconnected with the liquor traffic. If we take up the New York papers, we seem to come nearer home. There we read of wife-beating, and “stabbing whilst drunk.” “Liquor stores” are advertised for sale or to be let, but they are few in number as compared with similar announcements on this side of the Atlantic. A stranger who travels through the United States, receives the impression that there is comparatively little alcohol drunk by any persons excepting foreigners, and that the people of the country are sober, and this impression is to some extent, but not entirely, correct. The traveller may visit and dine in large hotels in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, and he will hardly see any beer or wine upon the table,[339] but——if he follows the guests after dinner, he will find, in many places, that they adjourn to the bar and drink whisky! Bar-drinking, especially what Dickens called “perpendicular drinking,” that is, taking a stand-up drink and then going off, is the usual American mode of “liquoring up,” and that is, in some towns, carried to great excess.[340] But, says an English author, of the man who thus indulges, “the number of drinks he will take at that bar before business hours are over would astonish people of the same class here.”[341] And the class referred to comprises “merchants, generals, colonels, senators, and officers of state, who patronise these bars as freely as we would a flower-show,”—a “class of men who in our country would no more be seen entering a public-house than they would be seen entering a house of ill-fame.”[342] This statement is probably a little exaggerated: the American “bar” can hardly be compared to an English gin-palace, and, moreover, strangers are apt to be misled as to the character of the persons whom they see in such places. There are drinking shops in certain parts of London which are regularly frequented