mpose its will upon
the crowd.

When I was in England I amused myself one day by writing an imaginary
picture of what England will be like when the last stage is reached and
London goes the way of New York and Chicago. I cast it in the form of a
letter from an American prohibitionist in which he describes the final
triumph of prohibition in England. With the permission of the reader I
reproduce it here:

THE ADVENT OF PROHIBITION IN ENGLAND

As written in the correspondence of an American visitor

How glad I am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform
of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is
something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so hard
to move.

We tried everything in the great campaign that we made, and
for ever so long it didn't seem to work. We had processions,
just as we did at home in America, with great banners
carried round bearing the inscription: "Do you want to save
the boy?" But these people looked on and said, "Boy? Boy?
What boy?" Our workers were almost disheartened. "Oh, sir,"
said one of them, an ex-barkeeper from Oklahoma, "it does
seem so hard that we have total prohibition in the States
and here they can get all the drink they want." And the good
fellow broke down and sobbed.

But at last it has come. After the most terrific efforts we
managed to get this nation stampeded, and for more than a
month now England has been dry. I wish you could have
witnessed the scenes, just like what we saw at home in
America, when it was known that the bill had passed. The
members of the House of Lords all stood up on their seats
and yelled, "Rah! Rah! Rah! Who's bone dry? We are!" And the
brewers and innkeepers were emptying their barrels of beer
into the Thames just as at St. Louis they emptied the beer
into the Mississippi.

I can't tell you with what pleasure I watched a group of
members of the Athenaeum Club sitting on the bank of the
Thames and opening bottles of champagne and pouring them
into the river. "To think," said one of them to me, "that
there was a time when I used to lap up a couple of quarts of
this terrible stuff every evening." I got him to give me a
few bottles as a souvenir, and I got some more souvenirs,
whiskey and liqueurs, when the members of the Beefsteak Club
were emptying out their cellars into Green Str