LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL. 449 



baking jjowder, flavoring extracts, mustard, and otlier spices. xVnd 

 this same law (elsewhere considered as to adulteration of li(|uors) 

 seems to encourage light wines by a distinct provision that " the blend- 

 ing of liquors will be permitted if spirits or other ingredients are not 

 added." In Rhode Island, if manufactured from fruit or grain 

 grown in the State, no license is required for the manufacture of 

 cider, wine, or malt liquors; and (with a thrift not uncharacteristic) 

 alcohol, while subject to a heavy license for home consumption, may 

 be produced for exportation without any license at all. 



IX. Remove all Duties, Taxes, Imposts, or Bukdexs of any 

 Sort on Food Products, Serials, or Meats, in order that the food 

 supply may be unfailing everywhere. 



Ten years ago the Hon. Edwin Reed, of Boston, Massachusetts, 

 published a pamphlet * in which he had the courage to say that, 

 if a man were well fed, liquor could have no terrors for him. " Take 

 care of the eating and the drinking will take care of itself." Repeal 

 all laws that in any degree and on any pretext tend to enhance the 

 market prices, was Mr. Reed's thesis, and he nailed it boldly to the 

 Massachusetts State-House door! Mr. Reed proceeded with figures 

 to remind us that the countries wbere drunkenness existed to the most 

 alarming degrees were those countries where the masses of the people 

 eat the least, see meat perhaps once or twice a year, and perhaps 

 never; where the year's labor barely suffices to pay the year's taxes! 

 — in Italy, Russia, or Sweden, and parts of Germany, for example, 

 where life is a struggle for bread enough to keep life in the body. 

 The figures Mr. Reed gives are too appalling for an Anglo-Saxon to 

 read calmly. " If Russia," says Mr. Reed, '' could reduce her infant 

 mortality to that of Great Britain she would save annually a million 

 of lives. Half the Russian mothers can not nurse their children. 

 The whip and spur of poverty drives them to labor in the fields, where 

 they follow the plow three days after confinement, and where the 

 death rate is forty-eight per thousand. ... In France many a fac- 

 tory hand lives on a slice of sour bread for a meal, over which he is 

 fortunate if he can rub an onion to give it flavor. ... In Italy, 

 where taxes are imposed to twenty-five per cent of the laborer's in- 

 come, the average length of life is twenty-seven years, and the whole 

 kingdom is mortgaged to an average of seventeen per cent." In 

 "Wiirtemberg Mr. Reed assures us that " in this garden of Germany 

 the peasant lives on black bread and potatoes with meat only once 

 a year." And even in England Mr. Reed (quoting his authority) 

 declares that the collier breakfasts on bread soaked in hot water and 

 flavored with onion, dines on bread and hard cheese, with sour, thin 



* A New View of the Temperance Question. By Edwin Reed, Boston, 1889. 

 VOL. LV. — .3.3 



