[To sHE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR.") Sts,—Shortly after reading
your article on "A Dry America" I came across the following passage in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (author. of Erewhon). Can it be denied that man's upward progression from lower forms has been pari puma with hie invention and use_of alcoholic beverage? The point is worth consideration. There are those who think that the American of the States with a slackening tide of immigra- tion may revert to the North American Indian type. It is an interesting speculation to suppose that compulsory teetotalism
" When we were at Shrewsbury the other day, coming up the Abbey Foregate, we met a funeral and debated whether or mot to take our hats off. We always do in Italy, that is to say in the country and in villages and small towns, but we have been told that it is not the custom to do on in large towns and in cities, which raises a question as to the exact figure that should bet reached by the population of a place before one need net take off one's hat to a funeral in one of its streets. At Shrewsbury seeing no one doing it we thought it might look singular and kept ours on. My friend Mr. Phillips, the tailor, was in one carriage. I did not see him, but he saw me and afterwards told me he had pointed me out to a clergyman who was in the carriage with bite. • Olt,' said the clergyman, • then that's the man wino says England owes all her greatness to intoxication.' This is rather a free translation of what I did my; but it only shows how impossible it is to please those who do not wish to be pleased. Tennyson may talk about the slow sad hours that bring us all things ill and all good things from evil, because this to vague and indefinite; but I may not say that, in spite of the terrible consequences of drunkenness, man's intellectual development would not have reached its present stage without the stimulus of alcohol—which I believe to be both perfectly true and pretty generally admitted— because this is definite. I do not think I said more than this. and am sure that no one can detest drunkenness more than I de.• It seems to me it will be wiser in me not to try to make headway at Shrewsbury."
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