universities, first as student and then as trustee, finds the young men of the present generation incomparably superior to earlier generations in their whole attitude toward alcohol. In his days at college there was never a morning when the college yard did not show one or two students under the influence of alcohol, whose condition was unreprobated by their contemporaries. Students get drunk today, but the proportion is by comparison negligible. In addition with a new seriousness and wholesomeness the modern student body is developing an interest in other forms of pleasure which are destined in time to swing the rebels and weaklings into line. When youth itself voices distaste, the tide has turned, and here and there, throughout our educational institutions, the word, not of criticism, but of disgust for the carrier of the flask, is beginning to be heard.

The generation of children growing up, who have never seen a saloon, to whom the once common sight of the Saturday night bacchanalian orgie near the drinking resorts is not the ordinary tolerated incident of the week, is the generation most profoundly affected by Prohibition. These children are coming to maturity in a world becoming emancipated from the degradations and vulgarities which are inevitably associated with free access to alcohol. The flaunting defiance of the law against alcohol in our large cities cannot be dissociated from the defiance of all other law in those crowded, inchoate centers, and should not blind us to the decencies and conformities in our smaller communities where the Eighteenth Amendment brings additional strength to an enforcing public opinion.

There is a suspicion in many minds that the abuse of alcohol has passed from a lower to a higher stratum of society, and that it is the educated, privileged groups among the young on whom Prohibition is working a deleterious effect. In a measure this cannot fail to be true, not necessarily because the so-called higher stratum is more lawless and the lower less, but because the group with the largest funds can most effectively defy the law. In so far as higher and lower are measures of income, it is safe to say that the worst lawbreakers of this kind among the young are those with the most elastic pocketbooks.

As far as the young women are concerned there are certainly

groups, both among girls who are brought into juvenile courts and those who are expelled from college, who are using alcohol as the same type of girl did not do a generation ago. But is this due to the existence of the Eighteenth Amendment, or to the extraordinary extension of opportunity open to the young women of today? The girl of this decade is being brought before the bar of public disapproval by the horrified adult, and is making out a pretty good case against her prosecutor.

She says in effect, "You are letting me undertake work never before done by women. You are allowing me to be exposed at an early age to conditions and temptations to which women have never been subjected in the history of the world. I am in factories, stores, offices in the day time, and in theaters, at public dance halls, and on the streets at night, with no protection save such as society affords to all its members. You allow me to return to my home from my work or my play at all hours of the twenty-four unguarded. I am fending for myself in a world strange and alluring to me. I try all things, good and bad alike. You do not take responsibility for me. I will take it for myself, and you shall not blame me for the disasters I bring upon you or myself."

What, after all, has the older generation done save abdicate its position of authority and obligation toward the younger generation in relation to Prohibition as in relation to everything else? In so far as Prohibition has failed to do for the young what was hoped of it, the blame rests with the older generation. If we leave gunpowder around, can we punish children for blowing off their fingers? If we ourselves fail to have conviction enough to impress our standards upon our boys and girls, shall we hold them guilty?

The whole question of the effect of Prohibition upon the young is a question as to how adequately we safeguard and protect our children. Can we deny that we have largely left them to find their way in the wilderness of temptation we have allowed to grow up about them? Prohibition has succeded with our young people in proportion as it has succeeded with us-no more and no less. If we can gather hope for the future, it will not come from deploring present conditions nor from commiserating ourselves, but

from the contemplation of the development in our midst of vigorous, independent youth, which bears promise of courage enough to make its own judgments and genuinely establish standards, which we have indicated by a graceful gesture in the form of a law but have been too cowardly and too supine to enforce.

Our hope lies in the honesty of the younger generation and the clearsightedness with which they watch our blundering and our fumbling. They will never allow their children to do the things we have allowed them to do, and, from the bitter knowledge gained through our weakness and indecision, will be able to throw round the next generation a protection which we have failed to give them.

CORNELIA JAMES CANNON.

PROHIBITION AND PROSPERITY

BY THOMAS N. CARVER

Professor in Harvard University

THERE are many factors in the prosperity of any country or of any class. It would be useless to argue that Prohibition has been the only or the chief factor in the prosperity of this country or of our laboring population. That it has been one of the factors is a reasonable inference from such facts as we have, by any process of reasoning which we would apply to a similar problem.

When it comes to a pinch, practically every one admits that Prohibition or severe restriction of liquor consumption is necessary to secure the maximum economy of man power. Such a pinch came in the World War. Not only this country, but England, Germany and Austria as well found it necessary greatly to reduce the consumption of liquor. That was a time when every unit of man power counted; when no country could afford to waste any of it. No one doubted that drunkenness, at such a time, was a waste of man power that might produce tragic results. In these times of peace, the waste of man power is not so dangerous, nor are its results likely to be so cataclysmic, but it is pertinent to

ask whether, in the long run, they may not be as definite. Since the prosperity of a country depends upon the economizing of its man power, that prosperity must be at least retarded by wasting it.

In the long process of economic competition, the country that economizes its man power through sobriety—even enforced sobriety-may gain as definite an advantage, as in the acute struggle of a great war, over a rival that wastes its man power in drunkenness. The advantage of conserving food may eventually be almost as important in time of peace as it proved to be in time of war.

The money that used to be spent on drink, estimated at $2,000,000,000 annually, did not evaporate as soon as Prohibition was adopted. It continues to be spent, some of it, to be sure, for bootleg liquor. The poorer classes, or the classes that were formerly poor, are not the ones who are spending their money on bootleg liquor; it costs too much. Those who do, do not get so much liquor for their money and are at least so much better off. These observations probably have something to do with the fact that those who once formed our poorer classes are now so much more prosperous than they used to be. To be sure, the restriction of immigration is giving them higher wages than they would be getting if, at the close of the World War, we had opened our doors to the millions of wage workers who wanted to come. But even with our present wage scale, partly offset by our high cost of living, it is difficult to imagine our working people spending so much on other things as they are now spending if the saloon got as much of their money as it used to get, and if they were as frequently incapacitated by drunkenness as they used to be.

One need not stress the number of automobiles and talking machines; they had been increasing before National Prohibition. Even radio sets make such an appeal that the sales would have been considerable. There were always people who did not waste their money on drink. However, some of the money that formerly went for liquor probably goes for some of these things. Social workers state that the ratio of baby carriages to babies is noticeably higher than it used to be in the poorer quarters.

There is an astonishing amount of building reported, especially of small houses and apartments, but no great increase in the number of palatial residences or expensive apartments.

The most significant figures of all, however, relate to the extent to which laborers are entering the capitalist class. Savings deposits multiplied two and a half times from 1914 to 1924, while the number of depositors increased more than three and a half times. The amount of new industrial insurance per month increased from $61,484,000 to $292,094,000 between 1917 and 1924. The investment of wage workers in the shares of corporations is increasing so rapidly that all statistics are out of date before they can be published. Limited space permits mention of only a few of the more outstanding examples of employee ownership, which may be cited as evidence of the tremendous growth of this movement.1

In January, 1925, more than 65,000 employees of the Bell Telephone System were stockholders of record in the company, and more than 100,000 are acquiring stock. On December 31, 1923, the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company reported that more than 5,900 employees were subscribing for 17,496 shares of its stock. In March, 1924, out of a total of 159,000 stockholders of the United States Steel Corporation, 50,020 were employees. The Bethlehem Steel Company, at the beginning of 1925, reports that 14,000 employees have made application for stock under its purchase plan.

The Standard Gas and Electric Company states (1925) that seventy-five per cent. of its employees are stockholders; the Northern States Power Company that eighty per cent. of its employees are owners. Of the total 123,751 owners of Armour and Company and Swift and Company, 55,000, or nearly half, are reported to be employees. Mr. Richard Boeckel in Labor's Money cites the following cases:

Ninety-four thousand employees of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company own stock in that company. Employees of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company own 14,484 shares of its stock with a total par value of $1,448,400. Six thousand employees of the General Motors Corporation, one out of every 1See article by Ex-Secretary David F. Houston in The World's Work, January, 1925.