W. W. C.
PUNCHING THE DRINKS.
The latest move upon John Barleycorn's works is engineered by the legislative wisdom of the Old Dominion. It consists in a bell-punch on the model, embalmed already in poetry, of the implement which forms the most conspicuous feature of the street-car conductor's outfit. The disappearance of each drink is to be announced to all within hearing by a sprightly peal on a kind of joy-bell Edgar A. Poe lived too soon to include in his tintinnabulatory verses. The chimes vary in intensity and glee according to the magnitude of the event they at once celebrate and record. Lager elicits but a modest jingle, whisky unadorned is honored with a louder greeting, and the arrival of an artistic cobbler at the seat of thirst is the signal for a triple bob-major of the most brilliant vivacity. On a court day, an election day or a circus day the air will vibrate to the incessant and inspiriting clangor; and as in one part or another of the Commonwealth one at least of those festivals so dear to freemen is in blast always, the din will be ended only by midnight, resounding over her whole surface from daylight to the witching hour.
J.B.'s assailants, and their modes of attack, are innumerable. Every foot of his enceinte is scarred with the dint of siege, and from every battlement "the flight of baffled foes" he has "watched along the plain." Sap and storm have alike failed to bring down his rosy colors. Father Mathew, Gough, the Sons of Temperance, the Straight-Outs,—where are they? He stands intact and defiant. Should he surrender, it will be a wondrous triumph, and all the more so for the simplicity of the means. The marvel will be, as with Columbus and the egg, why everybody did not think of it long ago.
The way once opened, all will flock in. Divines, statesmen, moralists and financiers will all strike for the new placer. The moral reformers will brandish aloft the tinkling weapon, enthusiastic in their determination to use it to the utmost and bring down tippling to a minimum. Lawmakers and tax-gatherers will rejoice over a new and fertile source of revenue, and pile upon it impost on impost, secure of the approval of the most grumbling of tax-payers. To the new fiscal and moral California all will flock.
The extent of the revolution is as little to be estimated in advance as was that caused by Columbus's voyage. Strong drink pervades all civilized lands. It is a universal element, the elimination of which must produce changes impossible to be calculated or foreseen. Should the grand moral results anticipated follow, the difference between civilized man and his sober savage fellow will be widened. Progress will no longer be handicapped, and will press forward with accelerated speed. Its path will cease to be strewn with broken fortunes, happiness and bottles. Policemen and criminal courts will lose, according to standard statistics, four-fifths of their occupation. In that proportion the cause of virtue will gain. Mankind will be four hundred per cent. more honest and peaceable than before the passage of the whisky-punch bill. With the public treasury full, and the detective, the juryman and the shyster existent only in a fossil state, the millennium will have been, as the phrase runs, discounted.
But we run foul of the inevitable and inexorable If. Is the machine invented that is to do such work? Is it within the reach of any combination of springs, ratchets and clappers? Is the leviathan of strong drink to be hooked after that fashion—a bit put in his mouth and the monster made to draw the car of state? We shall see. The end would justify much more ponderous and hazardous means, and the chance is worth taking. Independent of the general blessing to mankind involved in the punch idea, Virginia proposes in it a special benefit to herself; and that of course is her chief motive. States so very much in debt as she is are not prone to quixotic philanthropy. Should this novel form of taxation assist in paying the interest on her bonds, she will patiently wait for the secondary, if broader, good accruing to the world at large. Men, she argues, who are able to indulge in stimulants are able to pay their debts, and at least their share of the public debt. Each click of the bell proclaims her adoption of this theory, and at the same time her anxiety to find some means of satisfying her creditors. If she can cancel at once her bonds and Barleycorn, so much the better.
E. B.
THE NAUTCH-DANCERS OF INDIA.
The Prince of Wales was severely censured by some of the English journals for dignifying by his presence the nautch-dancing of India. These performances are peculiar to the country and its religion, and constitute so important a part of the marvels of the East that few male travelers at least fail to witness them. Probably the prince saw no good reason why he should forego any of the benefits of sightseeing vouchsafed to the ordinary traveler. Dancing has always been an important feature of the ceremonial worship of most Oriental peoples. Every temple of note in India has attached to it a troop of nautch-dancers. According to Mr. Sellen, the author of Annotations of the Sacred Writing's of the Hindus (London, 1865), these young girls are "early initiated into all the mysteries of their profession. They are instructed in dancing and vocal and instrumental music, their chief employment being to chant the sacred hymns and perform nautches before their god on the recurrence of high festivals." One of the English papers declared that "witnessing the physical contortions of half-nude prostitutes" was hardly a commendable amusement in the future sovereign of Great Britain. But this is hardly just. Vile as the calling of the nautch-women may be—and one of their duties is to raise funds for the aggrandizement of the temple to which they are attached by selling themselves in its courts—it does not degrade like ordinary prostitution where all society shuns and abhors its votary. In India both priest and layman respect the calling of the nautch-girls as one advancing the cause of religion. It is possible, therefore, to see that their moral nature is, in a sense, sustained by self-respect. "Being always women of more or less personal attractions, which are enhanced," says the same author, "by all the seductions of dress, jewels, accomplishments and art, they frequently receive large sums for the favors they grant, and fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred, rupees have been known to be paid to these sirens at one time." Nor is this very much to be wondered at if it be true that they comprise among their number "some of the loveliest women in the world."