12 employed, hold 270,000 shares of its common stock, valued at more than $4,000,000. Employees of Sears, Roebuck and Company own 133,300 shares in that enterprise. Seventy per cent. of the workers employed by the International Harvester Company hold common stock in the company, the aggregate value of their holdings exceeding $5,000,000. Practically every workman employed by the Procter and Gamble Company is a shareholder in that company. Ninety per cent. of the employees of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company are stockholders. Every third man in the employ of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company holds one or more shares of stock.

A striking example of the popularity of investment in public utility corporations-which is general throughout the countryis the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, whose employees, at the beginning of 1924, had purchased 120,000 shares of its stock, with a market value of $4,200,000, which was one-fifth of the entire issue.

As for the railroads, more than 41,000 employees of the New York Central lines, representing one-fourth of the total number of employees, became stockholders in that company in February of this year. Two months later, 4,889 employees of the New York, New Haven and Hartford road subscribed to bonds in the company to the amount of $857,000.

To cap the climax we have the growth of labor banks to help take care of labor's money. The first labor bank in the United States was established in Washington, D. C., in 1920, and six months later, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers opened a bank in Cleveland. That organization has been most active in the field of labor banking and has more banks than any other single organization. Its late president, Mr. Warren S. Stone, in The World's Work for November, 1924, states that of the thirtythree labor banks then in existence in this country, ten were owned by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

The numbers of these labor banks is increasing at a rapid rate. They seem, moreover, to be established on sound banking principles and to have the esteem and support of well-known banking institutions. As for their resources, Mr. Stone makes this significant statement: "From the time the Cleveland bank

was started, we have averaged about a million a month in deposits. This is only one bank. The saving power of American workingmen is so great that, if they would save and carefully invest their savings, in ten years they could be one of the dominating financial powers of the world."

Any one who attempts to explain all these amazing signs of prosperity among our working classes without mentioning Prohibition seems to me as extreme as the one who would explain them on the ground of Prohibition alone. I can not explain them except by bringing in Prohibition as a contributing factor.

THOMAS N. CARVER.

THE SITUATION WE ARE IN AND THE WAY OUT

BY HORACE D. TAFT

Headmaster of the Taft School

I AM one of those who were opposed to Prohibition.

I believe enormous good has followed the adoption of Prohibition. It has resulted in enormous benefits for the whole country. A man who will consider the overwhelming evidence to this effect may also get some understanding of the fixed opinion of a large part of the American people in favor of Prohibition. He will find the results in a great increase in savings, in the marked improvement of the appearance of the school children from the homes of the poor, in the strong conviction on the part of great employers of labor as to the benefit derived by their workmen, in a great lessening in most of the country of the diseases arising from alcoholism and of the large class of petty crimes connected with the

same.

On the other hand, an enormous amount of evil has followed the adoption of this policy. There is no debate on this. The drys admit it and blame the wets for it. The wets not only admit it, but exaggerate it, and blame Prohibition for it. We all know the main features of the picture. We know of the floods of bootleg liquor coming in over the Canadian border and over our coast

line. We know of breweries that are making real beer and transporting it in large quantities; we know of the home brew and the drinking of poisonous stuff. But, and this is the main point, we know that all of this infamous traffic means wholesale corruption. In the great wet section of the country this corruption has honeycombed the police and detective services and the national enforcement service, and has reached many of the prosecuting officers and, in some cases, the Bench itself.

Now I submit that this question is so vital that it calls on every patriotic man or woman in the country to give his best thought to it that he may think a way out, and, having done so, to follow that way to the end with any sacrifice of personal enjoyment, or, what is harder, of opinions or prejudices. And let me repeat here that I was not a Prohibitionist. I was heartily opposed to the policy. I do not now think that it was a wise way to handle the problem.

What ways out have been proposed?

First, repeal the Amendment. I affirm that no man can think clearly on the subject who dreams of such a repeal. In the first place, though many of us know the constitutional requirements, few seem to realize them. Up in my little village some people talk as though a rousing majority in a Watertown town meeting would repeal the Amendment. What is it that the Constitution requires? First, a two-thirds vote in one house of Congress, an enormous majority, then a two-thirds vote in the other house, then the ratification of the repeal by three-fourths of the States. Twenty-six of the States, or two more than half, adopted Prohibition for themselves before Congress touched the matter, and they are drier today than they were then. But the question hardly needs argument. Most of the wets admit that repeal is impossible.

Let me repeat that you cannot discuss the question with the slightest intelligence until you have absolutely made up your mind that Prohibition has come to stay. This fact rules out nine-tenths of the remarks or arguments which are intended as an excuse for drinking or as a suggestion of a way out. Of what use to cite the example of some Canadian Province, to discuss the beauties of Government monopoly, to discuss the question

whether the Amendment was "put over", to discuss the advantages of an impossible referendum, if the Amendment is here to stay? We are hunting for a way out and none lies here.

What is the next way? Let us change the Volstead Act so as to permit the manufacture and sale of beer and light wines. The great difficulty is that we live in a hopelessly wet section and unless we study broadly the public opinion of the whole country we have no idea of the situation. You might as well ask a man at the bottom of a well his opinion of the landscape as to ask a New York or New Jersey club man his opinion of the United States on this subject. The man in the well is in a wet section too. The truth is that there is no hope whatever of a beer and wine amendment, for not only is the public opinion of the Nation strong against it, but this public opinion tends to grow stronger.

But much more important than that, a beer and wine amendment would only make matters very much worse. The flood of hard liquor would still go on, the saloon would come back, the beer and wine would inevitably grow stronger, and the honest officials would be hopelessly handicapped. Understand that I am not discussing the question of the harm of drink. I am discussing the vital question of the corruption and demoralization. I can think of nothing so hopeless as our situation if we had a beer and wine amendment. It would be confusion worse confounded. How innocent must those good people be who think that the bootleg trade would be abated in any degree! We should combine all the evils of our present situation with those of the old days. Of course such an amendment would have to pass the courts anyhow. More confusion. The law would have to forbid the making of beer and wine of intoxicating strength. Does anybody care for beer or wine without a "kick" in it? What does a "kick "mean? One prosecutor in Hartford told me that in the old days the great majority of the cases of drunkenness which he had to prosecute came from beer. To a man whose mind is not set on indulging his appetite, but has his eyes fixed on the rotting of our moral fiber, the beer and wine amendment offers no way out. But whether this be true or not, there is absolutely nothing in the manifestations of public opinion to indicate the slightest possibility of such an amendment.

What is the next way? Let the law become a dead letter. Now there are on the statute books of the different States quite a number of laws that are a dead letter. The Sunday baseball law with us in Connecticut is one. So far as I know it does no harm. The police do not bother about it and are not corrupted by it. The situation is as though the law were not. But how can we possibly make a dead letter of a law when 60,000,000 people are determined that it shall be enforced, when all our politicians and platforms announce that the law is going to be enforced, and, what is more to the point, when a whole army of corrupt officials know that there are millions in the law for them? It is easy to conceive of a situation in which saloons should be open on every corner in every city and in every favorable situation in country towns, with hard liquor, beers, and wines served openly. It is impossible to conceive of such a situation, however, without the corruption of the entire body of officials. These are the men who will not allow the law to become a dead letter as long as it is on the statute book. In that deadly matter of official corruption the law remains one of vast power. The talk about a dead letter law is shallow. It does not touch the root of the trouble. help us an inch out of this morass that we are in.

It does not

There we are. I think I have named every possible way out except one, that is, the straight, honest, open way, obey the law and enforce it. But you cannot enforce the law. Why not? Because you cannot enforce a law unless public sentiment is behind it. Well, for one thing you can obey it. You can stop drinking absolutely and stop doing your share to make a market for the

bootlegger. When you have done that you have done at least the first simple duty, the very least that can be asked of a good citizen. The direct responsibility of the drinker for the bootlegger, the responsibility for all the corruption and crime involved, must ever be kept in mind. One cannot dodge it by cursing Prohibition or the Prohibitionists. It is hard to exaggerate the folly of those who either refuse to recognize the dreadful results of the present situation or who, recognizing them, laughingly do their share to augment the evil.

But let us admit freely that a law cannot be reasonably well enforced without public sentiment behind it. There are two things