We may estimate the figures for 1912-13 as about $105,000,000. Thus it is clear that the tobacco habit is a means by which the government is able to secure a large contribution, albeit an involuntary one, from the users.

2. The typical and commonly recognized advantage of tobacco is in the satisfaction of a certain craving and the production of a certain enjoyment which may be briefly designated by the medical term euphoria. This gratification is apparently not an entirely simple sensation, if we may credit the testimony of smokers, nor is it uniform in all persons. Some claim that tobacco quiets the nerves and therefore makes them more peaceably inclined, more ready to effect compromises in a dispute, and altogether more sociable. Others on the other hand, claim that it stimulates the mind and enables them to do better intellectual work.

In all cases the effect is personal, not social, and the evidence with regard to it is entirely subjective. Thus the claim that tobacco stimulates a person's brain, rests upon his own testimony. There is no reason to believe that the effect of nicotine on literary output can be detected by others, and the many cases in which smokers have deliberately given up the habit and yet continued to do their brain work with no diminution of effectiveness, create a strong presumption against attaching much weight to the subjective testimony on the subject. Equally indefinite and even less susceptible of objective measurement is the feeling of gratification or enjoyment which comes from the taste of the weed, and the narcotic effect of the nicotine. There is reason to suspect, however, that its comforting effects are often exaggerated. In such a case we shall avoid a prejudiced opinion, if we take the testimony of those whose interests favor the use of tobacco. The following statement occurs in an advertisement distributed by a tobacco company: "How have your cigars tasted for the last two weeks? Haven't you a mouthful of crumbled cigar now? Do you like a cigar that tasted like a dried cornstalk? Do you enjoy having a cankered tongue and a tender throat?" "You are smoking cigars, aren't you? Your throat tickles, your head is 'swimmy' in the morning, you have to steady your hand to sign a check, your stenographer hates you and your wife breathes a sigh of relief when you leave in the morning." This is not from the tract of an anti-tobacco society, but reflects unconsciously the opinion of the sellers of a certain brand of Havana cigars regarding the effects produced by other brands, in other words, by those which are in most common use by persons who cannot afford the more expensive grades. Indeed, it seems very probable that in many cases smoking is done, not because of the real enjoyment which comes from the practice, but because it has become a habit which the nicotinist cannot break himself of.

These facts point to the conclusion that while a part of what tobacco users spend is contributed by them towards the support of the government, and therefore should be credited to their account, the only clear and definite advantage is their euphoria, the purely subjective feeling of satisfaction which is indefinite and vague, and which there is reason to think is often exaggerated.

Our balance sheet, based upon this discussion might thus be formulated as follows:

Madam Nicotine in acct. with the People of the United States

Dr.

Cr.

Smokers' Euphoria,

In this balance sheet the item profit and loss is intentionally omitted. To include it would give this study the form of an argument instead of the simple statement of facts which it is intended to be. Every reader must, therefore, decide for himself on which side of the account the balance should be inserted, and doubtless many will decide this question, as they decide so many other questions, according to their personal inclinations. The smoker will be convinced that the enjoyment which he gets out of tobacco is worth all that the habit costs the community. The non-smoker, on the other hand, will feel that the non-smoking majority pay altogether too much for the pleasure of the smoking minority. Neither point of view interests the writer, and he will have spent his time in vain, if he has not made it clear that he has endeavored to construct a social balance sheet. The only question to decide, therefore, is whether the value of tobacco to society is worth what society pays for it in direct expenditure as well as in the destruction of property, lives, health, etc.

Certain other familiar topics are also omitted, not because they are lacking in interest or importance, but because the author believes in the maxim ne sutor supra crepidam and, being an economist, has limited himself to strictly economic and tangible topics. The field of ethics, e. g., is not entered, though some of the social and economic facts which are brought out may supply the moralist with useful data. Nor is the subject of manners considered, though courtesy may be regarded, in the words of an English statesman, as "a national asset." History too, is untouched, though tobacco first led to the introduction of slavery into Virginia and, therefore, has played an important part in our political and social evolution.

The main purpose of the article is to give tobacco its proper perspective. Many people, e. g., who are familiar with the significance of our drink bill do not realize that the amount annually spent on tobacco is about three-quarters of the amount spent on intoxicating beverages of all kinds.[25] The national war budget is always the subject of much criticism, and yet the appropriations for our army and navy are less than one-fourth what we spend annually on tobacco. For years the power of the government has been exerted to keep down the railroad rates, until it is claimed that the roads cannot pay the wages demanded by the men and give the public the service which it expects without an increase in charges. And yet an addition of but 25% to passenger fares would mean but about one-eighth of what the tobacco users spend without a thought, and would afford the railroads a welcome relief.

In estimating any social burden, account must be taken not only of its magnitude in a single year, but also of its persistency. One peculiarity of the tobacco habit is that, while it is often difficult to acquire, it is still more difficult to shake off. Indeed, in most cases the will is as much bound as if the smoker had signed, sealed, and delivered a mortgage on his own personality. This is well understood by the tobacco trust, which is giving away cigarettes to the people of China in the confidence that, once the habit has been acquired, the trust can collect its annual tribute, almost as surely as if it had conquered the country in war. Thus, it is not unfair to capitalize the annual expenditure on tobacco and to say that our country carries a direct interest charge of some $1,200,000,000 on a social mortgage, of which about $105,000,000 is in favor of the treasury, the balance in favor of the tobacco interests, in addition to the heavy personal and social burdens specified in our balance sheet. The direct charge alone represents the interest at 5% on $24,000,000,000 or over twenty-four times the interest-bearing public debt of the United States. No wonder the tobacco dealers are happy. And no wonder that shrewd old Dr. Burton, after saying what he could in favor of tobacco, in the words quoted at the beginning of this article, adds in conclusion: "A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used; but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul."

OUR ALCOHOL: ITS USE

It has long been more or less proverbial that Americans cannot drink without getting drunk; and yet the Americans are not counted an intemperate people, because probably a smaller proportion of them drink than of any other great nation. And it may not be altogether fanciful to suggest that it is also because the word intemperate is not applied to the absence of temperance in cases where people do not drink at all. And yet, in etymology and common sense, a man on the negative side of a temperate use of alcohol is as intemperate as a man on the positive side.

Those who deny that any use of alcohol is desirable run counter to the vast preponderance of all recorded opinion and sentiment—even as eloquently expressed in poetry and song. They may nevertheless be right, as were those who, not so long ago, were in the minority regarding war. But this minority opposed a fact unescapable in the then condition of human nature; and the present minority regarding alcohol are opposing a fact unescapable in the present condition of human nature. Whatever may be best for the future, it is undeniable that at the present time men will drink alcohol, and the only practical questions concern the circumstances most apt to make their drinking of it innocuous, and even beneficial, if there is any warrant for the widespread and time-honored opinion that, like every other thing claimed to be good, alcohol is good only when used under certain circumstances and in certain measure.

The temperance of the continental peoples, with their light wines, is a commonplace. The English native supply of alcoholic beverages is more like ours, and the climatic conditions more, on the whole, like those of our most thickly populated regions. Probably a much larger proportion of the English people "drink" than of our people, and they probably do it with results better, or at worst, less disastrous than those to such of our people as do it at all. A contrary impression, however, is widespread in consequence of confusing England with Scotland. But the conditions and the results are very different.

So are those of England as compared with ours, and it may be well to compare the mood and manner of their drinking with ours. Society must always frown upon the morose and solitary drinker—the man who drinks merely for the purpose of injecting alcohol into his system. Drinking should be regarded only as a means, not as an end. It is not good in and for itself; it is good only as an aid toward loftier things. The great virtue of drinking, granting it virtue, is that it may ease the perilous and delicate ascent to human intercourse, or, to change the metaphor, alcohol is the best of social lubricants. Other things equal, it is easier to get acquainted with a man who does not scorn the temperate wine, than with one who does. With the latter, a ready element of mutuality is absent, and you have to beat about for some simple and casual means of give and take. But an incidental compotation, though it is accused, not unjustly, of being dangerous to the weak, to the normal and preponderant proportion of humanity, serves as a letter of introduction; and "What will you have?" is but the first question in that mystic catechism which may lead to "What gifts of sympathy and kindliness may we exchange?"

The justification for drinking of course asserts itself most clearly at home around the hospitable board, or in the comfortable corner of the club, where conversation is paramount, and an occasional sip serves merely as a comma or semi-colon in the talk. Under such ideal conditions, wine eases the fluency of conversation, brightens the wit, humanizes the humor, and mystically charms away that native diffidence which is a bar to confidence and sympathy. One does not readily deal lies to one's host at dinner over a glass of wine; and our little shifts and poses, our false evasions and our falser modesties, melt away to the limbo of things forgotten when we exchange a friendly high-ball at the club. But unfortunately a very small proportion of the whole community can afford good wine at dinner, and hardly a larger number can enjoy the amenities of a club. For social drinking the vast majority of men must frequent the public bars, and adventure on a chat with whoever is about. It follows that the atmosphere of the public bars must exert an inevitable influence over most of the men who drink at all. A man is moulded by the clubs that he frequents; the public bar is the only available club for the small tradesman and the manual laborer, the homeless and the friendless and the poor; and the great saloon-frequenting class must necessarily become inoculated with the social tone of the saloons that they frequent. If one reeks with foul language, its patrons will become imbued with the habit of profanity; but if its atmosphere be genial and genteel, its patrons will maintain, or else adopt, the amenities of more graceful intercourse. The social influence of the public bar is subtle and insinuating in its effect upon the individual and unavoidable in its effect upon the whole community; it may be an influence for evil or for good; it may even ultimately save or damn a nation. There arises from this circumstance a weighty problem, which demands more careful consideration from our sociologists than it has yet received.

The proposition, simply stated, is just this: Whatever serves to lift the tone of social drinking serves strongly to refine the nation; and whatever tends to debase the tone of drinking in saloons and public-houses tends to degrade the social atmosphere of the community at large. It follows that one of the easiest and most effective ways to clean up the slums of any of our cities would be to exercise a sympathetic and paternal supervision over their saloons. Some such idea as this was in the mind of the late Bishop Potter of New York when he inaugurated the so-called Subway Tavern.

At the present time the average American saloon, particularly in our southern and middle western states, is a vile place, and exerts a pernicious influence over the largest class of the community. As a result, a strong movement has been instituted to abolish the saloon. The states that have adopted prohibition have done it not so much with the idea that social drinking in itself is bad, as with the idea that the average saloon is bad, and that prohibition is the only means of undermining the influence of the average saloon. But might it not be wiser to realize that the saloon might be made an instrument for good, and not for evil, if, instead of being abolished, it should be tactfully reformed? A decent and respectable saloon may radiate decency and respectability throughout its neighborhood; and men who learn to drink genially and temperately with their fellows are not likely to descend to vulgar rowdyism in other ways of intercourse, or, still worse, to "booze" at home. After hours, many, probably most, workingmen will drink; we surely have no human right to decree that they shall not; but we may exercise the human grace of helping them to drink socially and decently instead of alone and vilely. At present the rudeness of our average saloon spreads like a contagious disease to the homes of all the men who breathe its evil air. If we could make our saloons less vulgar and more clubable, if we could lift the tone of public drinking among our less fortunate classes, we should spread abroad a sense of the amenities, a wholesome social feeling, and a glimmer of the finer graces of gentility.

There is much virtue in this "if"; and it must not be supposed that the condition it suggests is unattainable except in the idle dreams of an idealist. We have before us an example of precisely what we need, in the average English public-house. The world-engirdling empery of England is vested in the wholesomeness and sturdiness of her middle and lower classes; and if you need evidence to convince you that England is still dauntless and undefeatable among the nations, you have only to observe these classes in their clubs,—the ordinary English public taverns. In Salisbury, for instance, there is a venerable hostelry that is called the "Haunch of Venison." I do not hesitate to advertise it by its actual name; for it deserves and demands a visit from every American whose interest in the solitary contemplation of cathedral architecture has not made him forget that man is, first of all, a social being. If he will proceed almost any evening to the tiny smoking-room upon the second floor (ducking his head beneath the mediæval rafters if he be above the middle height), and will join casually in the conversation of the company he meets there, he will discover something about the social possibilities of the public tavern that he has never learned at home. The company consists of small tradesmen of the town who have bolted up their shutters and gathered for a genial glass or two of "bitter" before resigning to the night. The talk deals earnestly with politics; protection and free trade are weighed logically one against the other, the measures of Mr. Lloyd-George are discussed in the spirit more of the economist than of the partisan, the German menace is given its meed of attention, and the boy scout movement is explained to the visitor from overseas. A round of drinks is ordered quietly; and the American is asked about the tariff and the growth of monopolies in his own country, the rate of wages and the cost of living, and the policies of Mr. Roosevelt. Then the visitor assumes the part of host, and shifts the talk to English architecture, touching upon old houses in the neighborhood, the timber rafters of the room in which the company is gathered, the excavations at Old Sarum, the mood of Stonehenge underneath the setting sun, and the high-aspiring composition of the great cathedral. The proprietor of the tavern has looked in, spoken to nearly everybody by name, and offered another round of drinks with the compliments of the house. His charming wife joins the talk without embarrassment to anyone, and becomes a sort of sister to the company. So the evening proceeds, until at the closing hour of eleven the company disperses with hand-shakings and good wishes for the night.

And remember that this is a public-house, in the market-place of a little city, open to anyone who wishes to spend two-pence for a glass of ale. It is not a hotel; it is not aristocratic; you will not find the name of it in Baedeker; it is just an ordinary bar that gleams a welcome to the lax-jointed laborer in the street. And the "Haunch of Venison" at Salisbury is not to be considered as unique, but is rather to be taken as typical of the English public-house. In Canterbury, for example, there is a bar-room, the name of which I dare not mention lest I increase unduly the annual historic pilgrimage to that cathedral capital; but I am willing to say for the benefit of future American investigators that it may be entered either from the Parade or from the little square adjacent to the ancient gate of the cathedral precincts where the monument to Marlowe is erected. From the main entrance, in the Parade, you proceed through a bar-room to a cosy little smoking-room beyond. There is a goodly company of young clerks and salesmen and minor officials of the town, interested in cricket, the growing of hops, the suffragette movement, the state of business, and the proposals to reform the House of Lords. But I have led you thither mainly that you may meet the daughter of the proprietor, who trips in with a tray of drinks and sandwiches. She is a glowing girl of seventeen, exceedingly alive, pretty and witty, jolly and jocose. She has rather an Italian look, with black eyes and black and billowy hair, and is dressed in the deep blue that Raphael loved. She knows everyone by name, except yourself, to whom she is speedily introduced. She greets you with a deft remark and a delicious gurgle of young laughter. When she leaves the room, it is as if Puck or Peter Pan had darted away to tree-tops. You recall the harmony of her nicely modulated speech and rich contralto laughter; and you are not surprised when a young tradesman tells you that she has been studying singing for eight months in London and is already a favorite at local concerts. Again she romps into the little room, and the sense of life enlarges. She has brought her mother this time, who wishes to meet the newcomer to that nightly company; and at once you are reminded of Whitman's saying about women,—"The young are beautiful: but the old are more beautiful than the young." The mother reveals the same abundance of essential energy, but softened, modulated, and matured. Her face is a sweet memory of years that were: it has lost that impudence of smiling and tossing the chin at what is yet to be. But then the daughter laughs again and overwhelms you with the joy of youth. And this is a place that you came upon by chance, seeking a whiskey and soda!... How different, how wonderfully different, from the casual American saloon!

The main reason for the difference in tone between the American saloon and the English public-house is that the latter is hallowed by the familiar presence of women. In England the male bartender is practically unknown, and drinks are served almost universally by bar-maids. It is part of the inalienable birthright of women that they can always set the social tone of any business that they engage in, and without effort can compel the men with whom they come in contact to ascend or to descend to meet them on the level they have set. In New York, for instance, the same man who is flippant with the manicure-lady is respectful to the woman usher in the opera-house: instinctively, and without conscious consideration, he meets any business-woman in the mood that she expects of him. To the women and not to the men is it granted to control the tone of any association between the sexes: bad women can debase a business, good women can uplift it, whereas the men with whom they are engaged would of themselves be powerless to lower or to elevate its tone. The way in which stenographers and shop-girls are treated depends on the stenographers and shop-girls much more than on the men with whom their occupation throws them. This, as everybody knows, is a law of human nature. In England, custom has, for many generations, decreed that women shall control the tone of social drinking in the public bars; and it must be registered to the credit of the host of honorable women who have served as bar-maids that the tone of public drinking in England has been lifted to a level that has not been attained in any other country.

Of English bars and bar-maids I think that I may speak with a certain authority. In the course of four visits to England during the last decade, I have traveled over nearly all the country; I have slept in every county in England except two, and wandered from town to town with an insatiable interest; and since I care more about people than about any other feature of the panoramic world, I have rarely in my rambles let slip an opportunity to pass an evening in a public-house and listen to the chat. To attempt a similar experience in America would be to discard it with disgust after three or four wasted evenings; but in the bars of England there is nearly always someone who is worthy to repay the task of seeking.

Of English bar-maids as a class I may say with certainty that they are almost uniformly chaste and—in the literal sense of that reverent adjective—respectable. Most of them are mature women,—the average age, I should say, being rather above thirty than below it; many of them are married; they have seen much of men and know how to keep all sorts and conditions in their proper places and in the proper mood. Yet they exercise this high command without any affectation of austerity. They are easily affable and pleasantly familiar with all who come. Many of them are endowed with a genuine and contagious jollity,—a merriment that is not assumed but which has arisen naturally from continuous converse with men of many humors. Their business introduces them to all the world; you step in from the street and know them; they talk with you frankly from the start, without any preliminary dodges and retreatings: and yet no one abuses their easy familiarity. They are addressed with deference as "Miss"; and the casual loiterer from the street takes leave of them as if he were saying good-evening to a hostess. In my entire experience of English bars—setting aside only a few in the tragic East End of London—I have never heard an obscene story told, and I have never heard the name of God taken in vain. The conversation is necessarily refined, out of respect for the women who stand within hearing. Furthermore, because the bars are tended by women, there is an accepted rule in every public-house of any standing that no drink shall ever be served to any customer who is at all intoxicated. A drunkard who would resent a refusal from a man accepts it without rudeness from a girl; and the result of this system is that (barring the slums, for whose degradation alcohol is not alone responsible) you can ramble from one end of England to the other without finding a drunken person in a single bar.

But you will notice at once a tragic change if you cross the border into Scotland. In Scotland, bars are tended by men, as in America; and their social tone is immeasurably lower than that which is maintained in England. They are noisy and riotous; the common conversation is heavily underscored with profanities and obscenities; and drunkenness is so prevalent as to seem an habitual detail. Of course, other causes than the absence of bar-maids contribute to the foulness of the Scottish public-houses. The austere and irksome law which makes it impossible to buy a drink after ten o'clock on any week-day evening and shuts up every bar in the country throughout the whole of the unbearable Scottish Sunday leads, naturally, to excessive and sodden drinking. It is tragic, on a Saturday evening in Edinburgh or Glasgow, to watch the hampered laborer and tradesman swilling liquor against the ticking of the clock in a rash attempt to swallow enough before the terminal hour of ten to carry them through the intolerable Sabbath. This is a dark picture, for which the fanatical austerity of the Scottish law must, in the main, be held responsible. It would be impossible to imagine English bar-maids in such a setting; and yet one cannot help wondering whether they might not alleviate that sodden atmosphere if they could be introduced in Scotland.

And similarly, one wonders what would happen if we should introduce them in America. The tone of our saloons is now prevailingly so low that it seems likely that if bar-maids were employed sporadically here and there they would be met with insults and be obliged either to resign or else to debase themselves. To our shame it must be said that, as a nation, we do not know how to treat women when we encounter them suddenly in what is to us an unaccustomed situation. The English, because they are many centuries older than we are, evince a traditional respect for women of all classes and in all circumstances that to us is not native and instinctive. The waitresses in our cheap restaurants are usually vulgar and we treat them vulgarly. It would doubtless take us a long time to educate ourselves up to bar-maids of the English type; but if we could successfully adopt the English custom, we should go far toward solving the problem of the American saloon, and should relegate the question of prohibition to the lumber-room of issues that are dead.

Thus far I have spoken only of the ordinary run of English bar-maids,—the affable and wholesome type that you may encounter everywhere. But those who linger in the memory are the exceptional among them, who have made the bar-rooms over which they have presided memorable among the really worthy places which one has discovered in the world. The English bar-maid of the better class creates an atmosphere of hospitable homeliness—in the historic sense of that sweetly connotative word—which is a boon to everyone who comes within its influence. You have arrived in a certain city after dark, a stranger in a strange environment; you have wandered about the moon-silvered solitude of the hushed cathedral close, wondering at a majesty half glimpsed and half imagined; you have mingled with the chattering multitude in the market-place, profoundly lonely among many who knew and cared about each other; and at last, in a hospitable bar-room, you meet without formality a woman who is glad to talk with you and who mystically, for an easy half an hour, makes you feel at home. How much of good may subtly be effected by a system that makes the homeless feel at home I leave the reader to imagine. Surely whatever soothes away the loneliness of the lonely may serve as a specific against the darker moods and a preventive of vice and even crime.

To the untraveled American, who knows only the saloons of his own country, it may seem incredible that a common bar-room should ever feel like home. But there is a passage in Ruskin which poetically explains this possibility. In his second lecture in "Sesame and Lilies," he has been saying that a true woman, wherever she goes, carries with her the sense of home; and he adds, with a fine poetic flourish:—

The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.

Even if Ruskin in this passage, as all too often in his writings, may be accused of an excess of sentiment [one wonders, for instance, if he has ever actually slept upon "the night-cold grass" and arisen without rheumatism to write eloquent prose about it], we may yet discern beneath his ecstasy of phrasing the existence of a solid and indisputable truth. Merely to meet a woman who personifies the sense of homeliness is to feel yourself at home.

And this comfortable sense of homeliness you may find in many an English bar-maid. If you wish to investigate upon your own account, you might try Bolland's Restaurant in Chester, or the Yates Wine Cellar in Manchester, or the Nelson in Gloucester, or the Crown in Salisbury, or—but I am not writing a guide-book to the bars of England, and, besides, every traveler is likely to fare best if he is left to his own devices. Of all the English bar-maids I have known, one (as is but natural) recurs preeminent in my recollections. I think that I shall tell you her name, because so many poems echo in it; but I shall not tell you more precisely where she may be found than to say that she is one of many who serve drinks in the bar of one of the great hotels that are clustered near Trafalgar Square. I think it was I who discovered Eileen; but I introduced her very soon to several of my friends in London, and thereafter (forsaking the clubs to which we had formerly reverted for a talk and a night-cap after the theatre) we formed a habit of gathering at midnight to meet Eileen and to chat amicably within the range of her most hospitable smile until the bar closed at half past twelve. Assuredly, in that alien metropolis, she made us feel at home; and we escaped out of the cacophonous reverberation of the Strand into the quietude of her presence like men who relax to slippered ease within the halo of a hearth. "She had a weary little way with her that made you think of quiet, intimate things,"—as one of us said at the outset of one of the many sonnets she inspired. There is a sweet weariness that reminds you of lullabying mothers and the drooping eyelids of little children drifting into dreams; and this was, I think, the essence of her. Her voice was like the soothing of a cool hand upon a tired brow. She was very simple in her dark dress and dark hair; and there was something maiden-motherly in her smile. You saw her most clearly when her frank eyes looked directly at you and deepened with a gleam of gentleness, and her lips parted tenderly to answer to the light within her eyes. Her hand, when she gave it to you in good-night, was like a memory of her voice; it had the same softness as of a whisper, it suggested the same sense of insuperable peace. I grew to know her very well, and could tell you her history if I would,—how she was brought up in the country, one of many children; how, when her sisters married and she did not (because the men who came were none of them the right one), she had to earn her living and began as a bar-maid in a railway station in the Midlands; how she came up to London and grew to be (though this she won't admit) a light in her particular occupation; of the long hours and the scanty leisure of her labor; of the compensation in the occasional people who come in and make an hour live with talk that is illumined and sincere, and in the occasional half-holiday rambles with a married sister over Hampstead Heath; of what is worth while in such a life and what is not; and of how it is that the eyes, though weary, can still sincerely smile with that glow as of a fireside, and the voice will evermore grow gentler through the years.

But my purpose is merely to help you to estimate her effect on us, who used to gather from the four quarters of London at the midnight hour for the sense of being near her; and, more generally, to estimate the effect of many women like Eileen, set in a position of publicity, upon the community at large. To gather for a social glass in such an atmosphere is to justify the best that poetry has claimed for the fruit of the vine. As Browning's Andrea del Sarto stated,—"So such things should be."

THE STORY OF A MICROBOPHOBIAC

There was once upon a time a man who underwent a severe and prolonged attack of Microbophobia. You may not find the term in the dictionaries, nor in the medical lexicons; but, as it is quite possible that there are a variety of things in heaven and earth not yet dreamt of in the lexicons, there is really no justification for denying the existence of microbophobia on that ground. And as to the name itself, there is hydrophobia, and photophobia, and Anglophobia—so why not microbophobia?

Microbophobia is a disease of advanced civilization, of recent origin, and infectious. Its victims are to be found among the married rather than the unmarried, in the city rather than in the country, and among the cultured rather than the uncultured. In a word, the disease rages most in college and university communities, but is also pronounced in high school, grade school, and kindergarten spheres of influence. As all these, however, are in close connection with colleges and universities, microbophobia may be said to belong to institutions of higher learning.

Microbophobia rarely succeeds in engrafting itself onto healthy organisms. No one in perfectly sound mental, physical, and spiritual health need fear its attacks. Its host is almost always in a state of depletion at the time of colonization, and the point of attack invariably the sensus communis, an organ situated in that part of the anatomy usually known as the cranial cavity.

Its symptoms—

But the history of the case shall tell you of the symptoms.

The subject was a professor. It seems that he had laid the foundations of the disease in his college days by exposing himself to bacillus scientificus, and contracting a case of methoditis scientifica, again an ailment whose attack is directed at the sensus communis, and whose ravages are greatest among the learned, especially those whose work necessitates intimate contact with symbols, chemicals, ancient manuscripts, and other odorous and dusty material. Its victims usually betray their condition by rushing about insisting that any and all the business of life is susceptible of the same orderly disposition as the material of their laboratories.

This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of methoditis, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of infection being without doubt his association with various of his faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward learned, were in various stages of the disease—though all considered themselves in perfect health.

For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment, and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the malady until the sensus communis was all but absolutely gone, without realizing the gravity of their condition.

The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of his malady. He married.

Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the sensus communis. Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club, who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation was the worst that could happen.

The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington, which he ought to have known was swarming with bacillus microbophobicus.

The ravages of the disease in both of them were frightful to behold. The professor's case developed with especial rapidity, so that in a few months both were in the same stage.

Stage? Yes, the stages of this disease are very clearly marked. In the first stage, you are attacked by a noticeable degree of thirst for knowledge about microbes; you read and talk about them constantly, and attend lectures on them at the university and the club.

This is a mild stage. You are for the most part amused, and only occasionally entertain the strange hallucinations which afterward come to possess you so thoroughly. Just to quiet your conscience, however, you adopt a few precautions—such as the use of bottled spring water, and the increase of your interest in the appearance and personal habits of the dairyman. This stage is termed microbophobia intellectualis. The professor and his wife early passed through it, with no serious results.

The second stage is more grave. You insist on a certificate from your dairyman, visit his barns, have the milk examined by your friend in the university laboratory, and finally, to be absolutely sure, pasteurize it. The drinking water you begin to filter and boil, you withdraw your patronage from the Chinese laundryman because you have heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.

It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you. The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of the common cup—or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the common basin. The second stage is denominated microbophobia alarmans.

The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage, but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is known to science as microbophobia parentum; in popular parlance, the baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club, and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope—and he will kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the risks you ran in your childhood. Having read that mothers are subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual playthings—nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the little mouth.

In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the feet by which the juice was trodden out.

The fourth stage is known as microbophobic moscophobia, which is the pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found, cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your interiors—that is, the interiors of your house—every six months. You read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and malaria in Italy—distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.

In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.

By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored, unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"—and you don't laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't worry—there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"

In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions—and worry more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into delirium microbophobicum, which is as much more awful than delirium tremens as microbes are smaller and more insidious and wiser than serpents.

The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity, and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the essayist on Man, and say: