Wandering books and drunken Torontonians

Yesterday, I was eating breakfast at a diner on the Danforth, and somebody gave me a book that had been deliberately left there as part of a project called BookCrossing. The idea is this: if you don't want a book any more, you assign it a unique number, leave a note in it, and then "release it into the wild".

If you find a wild book, you can enter its number into the BookCrossing registry and learn who left it and when. The book I got is a copy of Pierre Berton's "The National Dream", which is the first of a two-part history of the building of the first Canadian transcontinental railroad. I've read it, but a long time ago, so I am reading it again.

In passing, the book describes the Canada of the 1870s. Apparently, there wasn't much to do but work, argue about politics, go to church and drink. Especially drink. According to Berton:

Alcohol in the [1870s] was both the national pastime and the national problem. Half of all arrests in the Dominion were for offences connected with liquor. Toronto had more than five hundred saloons, dispensing whiskey at two cents a shot. Barn raisings, picnics and work "bees" of all kinds were lubricated with barrels of what the flourishing temperance movement was calling "demon rum". Delirium tremens was a common ailment. Special police were needed in the cities to trundle staggering workingmen off to jail, while others were left insensible or prostrate in the mud of the streets.

Since Toronto in the 1870s had a population of roughly 50,000, this meant there was one saloon for every one hundred people.