Unthinkable doom! Will the country inns fall before England falls, will the advancing horde of unbalanced old men and hysterical women [i.e., Prohibitionists] overthrow them by sheer lunatic persistence? Will impersonal café and garish soda-fountain supplant them, vending the Windy Waters in blasphemy against the memory of the brown beer? Will the wisdom that is spoken in bars give place to the scandal and tittle-tattle of Methodist tea-parties, or — fit punishment for a nation come to its second childhood — the high ecstasies of drinking give way to the mock saturnalia of Sunday School treats? Will this [pub-]sign that bears Statesman's portrait [i.e., a local hunting hound] fall to the ground in company with Coach and Horses, time-honoured Carpenters' Arms, Wheatsheaf, Barrel, Anchor, Windmill, Green Dragon, and White Swan — broken symbols of a broken England? O God! O Montreal!
Or will a race that has been tried too long and has been too long patient rise up at last in unexpected terrible wrath against its oppressors, as a sleepy elephant, long irritated by a buzzing hornet, leaps up with awful trumpeting to flick its tormentor into nothingness? Will England march solid behind the final comprehensive banner of the last of all the Societies that seek to suppress: the standard of the Anti Antis? And will a Crusade undreamed-of and unheralded, more fervent, more just, more terrible than any that have gone before, roll the enemies of liberty into the seas of England from the Atlantic to the Channel, with fire and sword pursuing them from Land's End to John o'Groat's...?
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