ABSTRACT
Right reason and Scandinavian experience—these are the converging roads to belief in that method of public-house reform on which attention is now being earnestly and hopefully fixed in both America and Great Britain. Right reason, contemplating in other departments of life the achievements and adaptabilities of the civic spirit, the spirit of local patriotism, its power of conducting the business, supplying the wants, healing the wounds and grappling with the foes of society, is constrained to ask why scope should not be allowed for its beneficent operation here too, where “our need is the sorest,” and where, if anywhere, the best blood is required to purify and regenerate our social system. Why, at least as an experiment, should not the peculiarly perilous alcohol monopoly be transferred from private to public hands, placed beyond the reach of private greed, cut off from its sinister connection with party politics, and disciplined to serve the community of which it has hitherto been in no small degree the tempter and tyrant. By thus socializing the public-house, its character and motive would be transformed, and abuses attacked at the root.
