Hygeia, a City of Health by Benjamin Ward Richardson
page 19 of 33 (57%)
page 19 of 33 (57%)
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supply drinking as well as flushing water.
As we walk the streets of our model city, we notice an absence of places for the public sale of spirituous liquors. Whether this be a voluntary purgation in goodly imitation of the National Temperance League, the effect of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's Permissive Bill and most permissive wit and wisdom, or the work of the Good Templars, we need not stay to inquire. We look at the fact only. To this city, as to the town of St. Johnsbury, in Vermont, which Mr. Hepworth Dixon has so graphically described, we may apply the description Mr. Dixon has written: 'No bar, no dram shop, no saloon defiles the place. Nor is there a single gaming hell or house of ill-repute.' Through all the workshops into which we pass, in whatever labour the men or women may be occupied,--and the place is noted for its manufacturing industry,--at whatever degree of heat or cold, strong drink is unknown. Practically, we are in a total abstainers' town, and a man seen intoxicated would be so avoided by the whole community, he would have no peace to remain. And, as smoking and drinking go largely together, as the two practices were, indeed, original exchanges of social degradations between the civilised man and the savage, the savage getting very much the worst of the bargain, so the practices largely disappear together. Pipe and glass, cigar and sherry-cobbler, like the Siamese twins, who could only live connected, have both died out in our model city. Tobacco, by far the most innocent partner of the firm, lived, as it perhaps deserved to do, a little the longest; but it passed away, and the tobacconist's counter, like the dram counter, has disappeared. The streets of our city, though sufficiently filled with busy people, |
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