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Hygeia, a City of Health by Benjamin Ward Richardson
page 19 of 33 (57%)
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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