For example, I believe that it is pretty well known that extreme prohibition measures bring about the most degrading and terrible forms of drunkenness known outside of Liverpool, and that of all the prohibitory statutes the Maine Liquor Law is about the worst. That is the case in real life, but not in Scribner’s Monthly, for in the year 1877—Dr. Holland being then the dominant figure in American letters—we find in an article on the Rangeley Lakes the following paragraph: “The Maine Liquor Law has certainly put an end to this régime (a barrel of rum to a barrel of beans), and with it have disappeared to a very great extent drunkenness, profanity, and kindred vices.”
Yes, my carping friend, we all know that the sentence which I have quoted is ridiculously untrue, and entirely out of place in a very interesting article on trout-fishing, but there was just as good a reason for printing it as there was for publishing The Christian League of Connecticut. That paragraph was well calculated to please folks of the variety that swooped down upon New York thirty thousand strong, under the banner of the Christian Endeavor Society.
I do not know why it is, but people of this class fairly revel in humbug of every description, and nothing pleases them more than to read about the beneficent influences of prohibitory legislation, or to swallow once more the old Anglo-Saxon lie about Albion’s virtue and the wickedness of France—and if you would like to see that miserable fallacy whacked in the head read Mr. Brownell’s French Traits—or even to gloat over Mr. Gladden’s story of the princely generosity that prevails in the religious circles of New England.
These Christian Endeavor people are a mystery to me. More than thirty thousand of them took possession of our city, and there was one erring brother among them who fell by the wayside, and was locked up in the House of Detention, charged with having been robbed of his return-ticket and about two hundred dollars in money. He was confined nearly a week, and during that time not one of his fellow Christian Endeavorers held out a helping hand to him. If the unfortunate man had come on from the West to attend a convention of sneak-thieves he would have fared better than he did.
“But what have the Christian Endeavorers to do with literature?” asks my doubting and critical friend. They have a great deal to do with literature just now, more’s the pity. I did not drag them into these pages by the neck and ears simply to say what I thought of them (although I am not sorry to do that), but to give my audience an idea of one of the elements—and it is a large one, too—to which our magazine publishers are obliged to cater, if they wish to hold their own in point of circulation.
It is because of just such people as these that our periodical literature is constantly defaced by matter of the sort that I have mentioned, and we are all the time saying, just as Bonner said to the Pfaff poet, “It’s one thing in real life, but another in Harper’s and the Century.” So it happens that intelligent human beings must have their nostrils assailed with rubbish about the Maine Liquor Law putting a stop to profanity, because, forsooth, it is supposed to tickle the palates of a lot of sniveling humbugs, who are so busy with prayers and psalm-singing that they have not time to perform the commonest acts of decency and charity for one of their own kith and kin.
Understand me, I am not blaming the barons for putting stuff of this sort into their publications. If I were the proprietor of a great magazine I would have a picture of Robert Bonner over my desk, and the walls of my editorial rooms and business offices should be hung with the great Ledger maxims. There are a thousand mediocre people in this country to where there are five of superior intelligence; but, after all, the five have some rights that magazine barons are bound to respect, and I think that about Christmas-time every year some little attention ought to be shown them.