cian, who was born and reared in the village of Vermontville, Michigan, in which no saloon for the sale of liquor ever existed. He said that he had never heard profane swearing or saw a man real under the influence of intoxicating liquors until he was twelve or fourteen years of age; and when first seen and heard they were most shocking spectacles to him.

The beneficent influence of temperance is also illustrated in the case of Greenland, in which country crime is said to be almost unknown. The Governor of that country, during his visit to the Juniata, that went in search of the Polaris in 1873, remarked, that crime is unknown there, which fact he attributed to the absence of spirituous liquors.

FELONY INCREASED BY INTEMPERANCE.

I am indebted to Mr. Carroll D. Wright, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Boston, Mass., for the eleventh annual report of that Bureau. On page 191, I find the following: "It is true that sentences for minor crimes and misdemeanors and even felony and aggravated crimes have risen or fallen as indicated by the sentences for rum crimes alone." On page 195, the Report on Criminal statistics concludes as follows; "While by the statistics presented it has been shown that sixty per cent. of all sentences for crime are attributable directly to the use or alleged sale of liquor, yet in how far rum is responsible for the balance of crime-the remaining forty per cent.-we have no present means of determining. That this element, so essential to the full understanding of the question, may not be wanting, we have instituted in the nine circuits in Suffolk County, which have criminal jurisdiction, an investigation upon each crime. This investigation was commenced Sept. 1, 1879, and will cover the sentences by the courts named for the period of one year. We shall present the result in the next annual report."

For one, I am heartily glad this question is to be investigated by some persons in official capacity. The result will be awaited with interest. It will be noticed that the statements of the Massachusetts Board are quite different from the final

statement quoted from the report of the trustees of the Michigan Prisons-"that the most dangerous element in our criminal population is not made by the use of intoxicatiug liquors."

I shall not attempt to argue whether the man who commits crime against property is a more dangerous man in community, than the one who strikes a fatal blow when frenzied with alcohol. But I do question whether rum does not, either directly or indirectly, exert a great influence in making the criminals of this class as well as of the lower class.

BLIGHTING INFLUENCE ON COMMUNITY.

Alcoholic beverages exert on any community that uses them, a blighting, baleful, damning influence more or less marked on nearly every person in that community; directly on the stupid person who drinks them, and on many of those who come in contact with him, and indirectly on nearly everybody else. It begets a low grade of morals and injures or cripples nearly every influence for good. Under this blighting influence men become indolent, profligate and vicious; and boys, with whom true reform must begin, become truant and neglectful of school-privileges. Both shun the sanctuary and become Sabbath-breakers and scoffers of religion. If the boys do not early learn to drink themselves, the influence of those who do, makes them gross and sensual. The gaming table is easily approached. The gambler has but a short step to take to become a burglar, counterfeiter, or a murderer. Often slight influences in youth and early manhood start men on a career either downward or upward. Where alcohol touches the tendency is downward, and young men who are placed in position to see and come daily in contact with its debauching influences can hardly avoid these effects to a greater or less degree.

As has already been shown, alcoholic beverages are the cause of many distressing chronic diseases, and in every prison report that pretends to note minutely the causes of crime, "disease" and ill-health will often be given as an element in the causation.

No other single agent in the world has ever caused a tithe of the amount of pauperism and abject misery in poverty, as has alcohol, and pauperism is a potent cause of both death and crime.

No other agent is so potent in the production, directly or indirectly or by hereditary transmission of devitalizing constitutional effects and of idiocy and insanity as is alcohol; and no class of persons are more dead to the realities of life than these are, and the insane are only removed from the aspersion of being as a class, the most dangerous of criminals by not being held to legal responsibility for their fiendish acts.

CONCLUSION.

Crime as we have noticed is almost unknown in those small cities, places and countries in which alcoholic beverages are not sold, while they are yet surrounded with cities and places in which alcoholics are sold and freely drank. We are forced to the conclusion, therefore, that if the use of alcohol as a beverage could be banished from this whole country as it is from these places (and may it not be ?), the first result would be, as regards crime, the stopping of all arrests for direct whiskey crimes; which is fully sixty per cent. of the whole number, as has been shown. Next would be left off from the records about fifteen to twenty per cent. more for other offenses resulting from the more indirect influence, leaving only twenty to twenty-five per cent.; and these would in the main be for offenses committed by those who commit crime for the sake gain and who may be generally quite temperate, and this all in the first year. With this great army, now criminals, and the 550,000 men now engaged in the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, turned from their evil ways, leading sober and temperate lives, and engaged in effective labor and honest pursuits, all arraigned on the side of right and against crime and those who would dare to commit crime, can any one doubt but the so-called high crimes would already begin to decrease?

Then after gambling halls had ceased to exist and the vicious habits and practices of the youth of to-day, that are

encouraged by the drinking habits of men, and which are in turn encouraged by laws that legalize traffic in alcoholic beverages, had ceased for a generation or two to exercise their baleful influence, and all the youth trained to virtue and godliness in an atmosphere thus freed from the pernicious odors and the moral pestilence caused by alcohol, does any. one believe there would then be more than five per cent. of the amount of crime that exists to-day? This result was very nearly reached, with less favorable circumstances than those we have supposed, in the short space of three years in the city of Dublin in Father Matthew's time, when the arrests for crime were reduced from 12,000 to 700, or to 5.83 per cent.

With the moral atmosphere thus purified, the health and life rates raised, as they would be, far beyond what would seem possible to most of us now, with healthier children born into the world, and with centenarians more numerous than persons of seventy years are to-day, the American people would soon become a nation of physical, intellectual and moral giants. Hospitals, asylums and prisons would become the homes of the bats and the moles, and the outside world would hasten to emulate our noble example, while ours would be such a nation as the God of nations would be pleased to own and to bless.

THE PHYSICIAN IN THE WITNESS-BOX.

"THE POST-MORTEM AND THE EVIDENCE."
[SPECIAL REPORT.]

By HENRY B. PIPER, M. D., Tyrone, Pennsylvania.

The physician on the witness-stand is likely to be subjected to interrogations, the correct answers to which may require the most intimate and thorough knowledge of all the details of medical knowledge, and also a familiar acquaintance with other and collateral sciences. To every practitioner, it is of great importance that his general qualifications shall exempt him from those ridiculous and humiliating exhibitions of igno

rance that are sometimes made by medical men in courts of law. It is certainly a matter of greater consequence to society that the evidence in all criminal trials be such as to enable the court and jury to determine truly the guilt or innocence of the individual accused; and in cases of death by poisoning or bodily injury, this oftentimes depends in a great measure upon the testimony of the medical witness. It is, therefore, of vital importance that the physician be well versed in all those details of his profession that pertain to medico-legal investigations, to the end that his deliverances on the witnessstand may be clear and comprehensive, and carry with them the weight of authority and the conviction that he possesses a reasonable knowledge of his profession and the subject before him.

The first court to which a medical man is likely to be summoned is the Coroner's inquest. Here his opinion may be required as an expert or skilled witness upon collateral issues of fact or opinion. It is very likely that he may be required to make a post-mortem examination to ascertain the cause of death, and to distinguish between real and supposed causes. In this case, every step should be taken with careful discretion and the examination made with care and precision. Every conclusion should be well established by the facts presented, and expressed with great caution. The gossiping tongues of an idle curiosity, as well as of the prejudiced and selfish members of community, are generally too ready to herald inconsiderate utterances of a medical man; taking care to supply the prefix: "the doctor said," in order to give them the color of professional authority; and this often to the prejudice of the physician and the perversion of justice.

Every physician summoned to this first court of inquiry should protect himself with full and accurate notes of all important facts. Such notes will often be of inestimable value to corroborate or refute subsequent testimony. They should be at his command to assist his memory or correct errors.

We will now state briefly the outlines of a necropsy in a case of suspected murder. We should remark first the attitude of the body and whether there is anything suggestive of