hibition prohibit? Of course, Prohibition does not completely stop the making and using of intoxicants. No prohibition law accomplishes its purpose so completely. It reduces the evil. This is the test for measuring the success of any law. There must be a measurable degree of success to have accomplished the results already secured.

Three stock arguments are offered by the brewery agents today in reply to these facts: Venality of enforcement agents; increasing arrests; drinking of youth. Formerly the control by the brewery interests threatened the life of the republic and made necessary a Senate investigation (1918) revealing corrupt practices, unparalleled by any other group in our history. The attempted subsidization of the press, the boycotting of business men who favored Prohibition, the raising of a million yearly in Pennsylvania to elect wet United States Senators, Representatives and State legislators, the customary trade tax of three cents per gallon on beer for a slush fund for politics, was just part of the brewery policy. This same influence today is corrupting public officials, violating the law in nearly every State in the Union and opposing the passage of enforcement laws. The record is the same in kind but less in degree since Prohibition outlawed this lawless business.

Crime caused by liquor has decreased throughout the country, including crimes of violence. The Federal Census of Prisoners for 1922 shows a decrease of 5.8 per 100,000 in the comparable ratios of penal population since 1917. In Indiana, the total commitments to jails and State farm in 1924 were six thousand fewer than in 1915, the last wet year in that State while prison commitments fell from 40,075 in 1916 to 31,408 in 1924. In Massachusetts seven of the twenty-one jails have been closed and two sold, because of the decrease in crime, while the number in the prisons of that State dropped from 5,239 in 1917 to 4,523 in 1924. In Connecticut jail admissions numbered 15,552 in 1917 and only 9,340 in 1924. The average yearly commitments in New Hampshire under license were 2,702.5. In 1924 they totalled 1,357. In New York State, the penal population fell from 15,343 in 1906 to 13,706 in 1924. United States District Attorney Edwin A. Olsen, of Chicago, who has made an enviable

record for successfully prosecuting criminals in the courts, attributes a crime increase in Chicago to a breakdown of State law enforcement machinery. He finds that crimes against the Federal Government in that district have decreased more than a third during the past year. His office has obtained more than 2,000 convictions in liquor cases in the past two years. State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe of Chicago has denied making the statement recently attributed to him, that there is 20 per cent. more crime in the country today than five years ago.

The total number of arrests throughout the country has increased in 1924 because of increased violation of the automobile and traffic laws and for offenses against sanitary, school and other municipal ordinances. In many communities these minor offenses number 90 per cent. or more of the total arrests. But they do not mean a crime wave. Sober men are less quarrelsome and less likely to be driven to crime by desperate need than drinking

men.

Youth, once recruited by the hundreds of thousands by the saloon, is an occasional instead of a regular drinker. The cost and quality of post-Volsteadian drinks does not create a habit as did the licensed intoxicants. The American youth problem is less serious than that in other countries. France, the land of the vine and of the heaviest alcohol consumption, and England, the home of beer, face the same question. English boys and girls throng dance clubs at all hours of the night with flasks on their hips, doing the very things the wets say young America is doing. The daily papers, notably The London Morning Post, have been full of letters on this theme, blaming youth's excesses on the housing situation, the movie and a host of other things, but Prohibition cannot be made the scapegoat there.

The attitude of the liquor trade toward youth is set forth in The Brewer's Journal, of England, February 15, 1922, thus:

Yearly tens of thousands of alcoholic drinkers die. With the rising generation and whether or not they take to alcohol rests the future of the Trade commercially, politically and economically.

The legalized exploitation of youth has been rejected by this nation, whose attitude was clearly expressed by President Coolidge in his message to Congress, December 6, 1923:

There is an inescapable personal responsibility for the development of character, of industry, of thrift and selfcontrol. These do not come from the government, but from the people themselves. But the government can and should always be expressive of the steadfast determination, always vigilant, to maintain conditions under which these virtues are most likely to develop and secure recognition and reward. This is the American Policy.

It is in accordance with this principle that we have enacted laws for the protection of the public health and have adopted prohibition in narcotic drugs and intoxicating liquors.

The bootlegger and moonshiner are our inheritance from the license days. The names they bear, the illegal trade they follow, the appetites they feed, the crimes they commit, are the product of the era when the liquor interests were in power and when drinking was common instead of rare, as today. They received no more attention then, than a mosquito bite next to a carbuncle. Now they are getting the attention because the greater evil is gone. Today we are arresting and imprisoning instead of ignoring these criminals. Convictions for violations of the Prohibition law numbered 37,558 in the last fiscal year in the Federal courts alone. The jail sentences imposed totalled over 3,187 years.

The cost of Prohibition enforcement is practically nominal. Fines and penalties paid into the Federal treasury by convicted liquor criminals last fiscal year amounted to $6,538,115.24. The total amount expended in administering the National Prohibition Act was $7,509,146.27. The greater number of cases are brought by the Federal agents before the State courts because of the congestion of Federal court dockets. Fines imposed by these courts do not go to the Federal treasury.

When the May offensive on land and sea was begun by the Coast Guard, Rum Row was broken. A few days of watchful waiting prevented the landing of the illegal cargoes. A campaign of terrorism against the officers and men of the Guard failed to shake the morale of the service. When the full complement of 200 destroyers, 100 fast patrol boats, 100 fast launches and over 4,000 men is given the Guard, the task of keeping rum pirates from our shores will be still more effectively accomplished. The next enforcement problem is redistilled industrial alcohol, the source of most of the illicit booze sold today.

Prohibition was demanded and is today supported by the

overwhelming majority of the American people, who also obey these laws. A small minority, generally motivated by appetite or the desire to make money from the appetite of the liquoraddict, oppose. Election returns, showing increased numbers of dry candidates elected, and the popular vote in referenda on enforcement of the law, reveal the strength of the dry public sentiment. The law is not being enforced against the American people. It is being obeyed by the American people and enforced against the un-American, the alien, the lawless and the vicious minority. That minority today prevents the decrease in crime from being even greater.

Despite imperfections and they are only a decimal of those attributed to it by those who are seeking to bring about the return of the brewer to wealth and political power-Prohibition is far superior to any of the systems of liquor control which have been devised. The uncontrollable character of the traffic compelled its outlawry after every alternative, except abject surrender, had been tried. Prohibition is effective to the degree in which the people of a community have organized the expression of their sentiment on this question. When such organization has failed, the united forces of the foes of the Eighteenth Amendment have prevented the enforcement of the law, in part. The American republic has solemnly placed itself on record as prohibiting the greatest enemy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are not enough society cream-puffs, political grafters, underworld gun-men or social morons in the land to prevent the fulfilment of that prohibition.

WAYNE B. WHEELER.

PROHIBITION AND RESPECT FOR LAW

FIVE

BY JAMES J. BRITT

Chief Counsel of the Prohibition Unit

years ago, backed by Constitutional sanctions, Prohibition became the law of the land. No more intoxicating liquors for beverage use were to be made or sold to the end that none be

drunk. A social change so fundamental and far-reaching had rarely been proposed. Customs deeply rooted in the lives of men since history began had now become unlawful. That it was done advisedly, after two generations of open discussion, and in the ways provided by the organic law itself, only cavilers will gainsay.

Now, after five years, we are asked what is the effect of Prohibition upon that respect for law in general upon which civilization depends. Let us first inquire whether Prohibition is a sound national policy, and whether we have made reasonable progress toward its enforcement, that we may the better determine whether, in our efforts toward that end, we have undermined the sanctions of other laws. If, in accomplishing a great good, some injury results, it may well be borne.

It is our American way to embody our vital social policies in constitutions and laws and hold them to be good or bad in proportion as they protect our lives, promote our interests, and restrain the moral weaknesses of our natures, and by these tokens Prohibition must stand or fall. It is one of those self-imposed restraints which Edmund Burke held as among the most valuable rights of freemen. In our self-governing community their necessity is the more imperative, and we have been quick to see their value and ready to assume their obligations. We are an introspective, selfchastening people, given to diagnose our social maladies by severe moral tests, and, heedless of pain, to operate upon our own ills. Thus we destroyed human slavery, broke up State lotteries, applied the rod of correction to trusts and monopolies, and made interstate traffic in women a crime.

And, after more than fifty years of active skirmishing, we came to deadly grips with the saloon. The Church, the Anti-Saloon League, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and other organizations, long interested, became deadly in earnest and moved rapidly to the attack. They applied to the liquor evil those acid tests which challenge social standards to justify themselves or be destroyed. Women and children joined in the fray, and everywhere the lines of battle were drawn. We saw billions spent for that which did nothing for body or soul, but endangered both and formed a recruiting station for jails and almshouses, with