[It is many years since, but we remember that in at least two cases, the prescription was volunteered. Ed.]
"As for the expense caused by driving for pleasure, our statistics do not give us a conclusive answer, but they at least supply us with an outside figure, for Uncle Sam in counting his horses at the time of the last census distinguished between those on farms and those elsewhere. It is fair to assume that the great bulk of the horses used for pleasure are in the second class, and that they constitute a comparatively small fraction of that class. Now horses not on farms numbered 3,182,789 in 1910, and were valued at $422,204,393. In other words, a third of what smokers spend for tobacco would enable them to buy up all of the horses in a big class, only a fraction of which is used for pleasure, and an equal amount would probably suffice for their keep.
"In the case of automobiles, it is still more difficult to distinguish between those used for pleasure and those used for directly productive or public purposes. However, the object of the article was to call attention not so much to gross figures of expenditure, as to the indirect burden imposed by smokers upon the community at large. The automobilist who is willing to run down innocent wayfarers rather than curb his craze for speed is in the same class with the smoker who so smokes as to destroy property and life. Indeed the two are often identical, and it was no mere accident that led the Massachusetts Forestry Association to depict upon its poster designed to stop forest fires, a party of smoking automobilists bowling along and leaving a trail of fire behind them. If the 'Review' can devise some painless way of eliminating both the reckless smoker and the reckless joy-rider from the landscape, it will kill two undesirable birds with one stone."
And as to alcohol. Well! There's Horace and Schiller and the feast of Cana, and the whiskey Lincoln wanted for his other generals, and lots of other people and facts.
But as to bar-maids, we are bound to say that since the graceful tribute to them on earlier pages was in type, there has been placed in our hands evidence of a crusade against their employment in England, and of its abolition by law in South Australia. See the Memoir of Margaret Ethel Macdonald. London, 1913.
For all we know, the preponderance of argument may be against the substitution of women for men as barkeepers; but we suspect that at least it would diminish the shooting at and by barkeepers, in New York.
And another thing we think we do know—that in these progressive days, it would be hard to find any pursuit in which women are engaged, where there is not agitation to improve it off the face of the earth. Their old-fashioned pursuits of wife and mother have lately been specially honored by such agitation.