THE FOAM FLIES

A literary controversy comparable to that between the Ancients and the Moderns is in the making, with the President of the Wesleyan Conference at London as the champion of prohibition, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, English novelist, taking the side of the temperate wine-bibbers. The eminent churchman decries the charge that complete abstinence will cut him off "from understanding all that is good to understand in Swift or Shakespeare". Sir Arthur, in reply, presents the total abstainer as imperfectly equipped either to create or appreciate high literature, because "high literature demands total manhood, of which teetotal manhood is obviously a modification."

From the author's argument, we further learn that Europe must own to one teetotaller--the Turk: his deficiencies in literary or any other kind of productions are pointed out as incontestable evidence of what want of the bowl can do. Copious citations from Milton and the Bible lend to his discourse the austerity properly pertinent to the throne of Professor of English Literature at Cambridge: occupied, incidentally, by the same "Q."

Genuinely worried he seems to be; not by the controversy, but by the apparent imminence of Prohibition. His true and recognized adversary is not the worthy churchman but this stalking ghost, Consider--if you conceivably can--the tragedy of an independent Englishman without his whisky and soda! The conception, however, may become the more awful actuality. From far Australia the soft padding of Mr. Johnson's paws are clearly audible in London; and in London, thirsty longshoremen have voluntarily foregone their beer. To the unfortunate students of literature at Cambridge we extend our sympathy; to them undoubtedly has fallen the unpleasant lot of having Sir Arthur's doctrines forced down their throats. They can reject them and become threadbare hack-writers; or swallow them and attain the airy pinnacles reached by our own Mr. Tumulty.