All but Idiots Stop the Tap.
SIR WILFRED LAWSON writing upon the subject of temperance, relates what occurred at a meeting in a northern county. Three clergymen were present. They set up Timothy as their model man morally, lauding and magnifying sobriety, but commending the temperate consumption of alcohol. When they had concluded, an elderly farmer rose and said, "I've heard that kind of tale for the last forty years, and I can't see that people are a bit more sober now than when it commenced. It reminds me of what I once saw take place at a retreat for imbeciles. It is the custom there, after the patients have been in residence for a certain time, to put them to a kind of test, to see whether they are fit to leave the asylum or not. They are taken to a trough full of water, with a small pipe continually running into it and supplying it. They are given a ladle, and told to empty it. Those who have not regained their senses keep ladling away, while the water flows in as fast as they ladle out, but them as isn't idiots stop the tap."