Maybe H. 3d will not like our version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" half as well as the original. But we fear that when he grows up he is going to find that there are still dragons and ogres and assorted monsters roaming the world. We want him to be instrumental in killing them. We don't want him to get clawed by going forward in foolishly overconfident forays.

There is the Tammany Tiger, for instance. Here and there a brave young fellow rises up and says, "I'm going to kill the Tiger." Having read the fairy stories, he thinks that the thing can be done by a little courage mixed with magic. He paints REFORM on a banner, charges ahead before anybody but the Tiger is ready and gets chewed up.

This is sentimentally appealing, but it has been a singularly useless system of ridding the city of the Tiger. I want H. 3d to know better and to act not only more wisely but more successfully. Somewhere in the story I plan to work in a paraphrase of something Emerson once said. Jack's last words to his army just before climbing the beanstalk will be, "If you strike a giant you must kill him."

XXVIII
VOLSTEAD AND CONVERSATION

There is one argument in favor of Prohibition. It certainly helps to make conversation on a railroad train. In the years before Volstead we had ridden thousands of miles silently peering at the two strangers across the smoking compartment and wondering how to get them talking. The weather is overrated as a common starting point. It dies after a sentence.

Now we have a sure method. Begin with, "Well, this is certainly just the day for a little shot of something," and you will find enough conversation on hand to carry you across the continent. Indeed, nothing but an ocean can stop it.

Some day, of course, we are going to run into a stranger who will reply, "Prohibition is now the national law of our land and I want you to know, sir, that I intend to respect it."

This has never happened yet. It makes us wonder how the drys get from point to point. Either they stay at home, abstain from smoking or betray their cause for the sake of friendliness. During two years of frequent travel we have never yet met an advocate of Prohibition in a smoking compartment.

There was nothing but the most fiery opposition on the part of the man who was going to Rochester.

"It's making criminals out of us," he declared severely but with an ill concealed joy at the thought of being at last, in ripe middle age, a law-breaker. He carried us into Albany with tales of men who "never touched a drop until they went and passed that there law." All these belated roisterers he pictured as reeling in and out of his office under the visible effects of illegal stimulation. He sought to create the impression that he thought the condition terrible, but evidently it had contributed a new and exciting factor to the wholesale fruit business. Even the pre-Volstead drinkers he seemed to find not unworthy of his concern. All of them used to take just one and stop. Now his life was beset with roaring graybeards.