regulation of its affairs. It does not seem to have any fixed principles or positive convictions as to excise methods and liquor laws. Its policy has been that of an opportunist, at the best, or an obstructionist, at the worst. As in all other industries which affect the welfare of the people, reforms have been forced from the outside, with no help from within. Of course this is equally true of insurance and railroad corporations, of food purveyors, mine owners, cotton merchants, and a score of other interests. It is due not merely to human selfishness but to shortsightedness; in other words, to a lack of statesmanship.

To call your opponents hypocrites, cranks, fakirs, and fanatics may relieve your feelings, but it doesn't convince anybody, and only hurts a just cause. It is foolish to question the motives of men who, without thought of personal gain, are trying to remedy the evils of inebriety.

The church is perfectly right in urging total abstinence upon the individual. The only path of safety lies in abstinence for some individuals. . . .

The recognition of the right of a community to establish its own licensing conditions carries with it the right of the community to determine whether there shall be any licenses at all!

To make the discussion of this subject as fruitful as possible, I venture to submit the following questions for your consideration. None of them involve any direct moral issue, but there is an honest difference of opinion about each one of them, and they are certainly of vital importance in determining the course of wise and just administration.

What has been the effect of high license?

How much public revenue should the traffic yield?

Does high license stimulate unlawful trade?

How much license tax should be imposed upon local bottlers and grocers? Should they be allowed to peddle beer or to sell it in single bottles?

Should the place or the individual be licensed?

Should the licensing authorities be appointive or elective? By whom should they be appointed, and for what term of office?

Have the courts made good or bad licensing authorities? Where the courts issue licenses, what has been the effect on the court?

Should the licensing authority alone have the power to revoke a license, and discretion to withhold a license?

How can the licensing authority enforce the law? Should it not be independent of the police?

What should be the penalty for breach of the law? Do not severe penalties miscarry?

On what plea, and under what conditions, should licenses be transferred?

What has been the effect of limiting the number of saloons? Should limitation be according to area or to population?

Is there any relation between the number of saloons and the volume of consumption?

What should be the limit to the hours of selling?

Should saloons be allowed to become places of entertainment? How can the sale of liquor by druggists be controlled?

How can spurious drinking clubs be prevented or controlled? How can the operation of disreputable hotels be prevented? What should be the definition of a hotel? Who should define it? By whom should it be licensed? What special privileges should be given to it?

How can the "back-room" evil be stopped? Is it legal (i.e. constitutional) to prohibit the sale or serving of liquor to women?

Has the removal of screens reduced the volume of consumption? Has it improved the character of saloons? Has it solved the problem of Sunday prohibition for any length of time? What has been the general effect of it in the tenement districts?

Should the state undertake to regulate the liquor business or to enforce liquor laws?

Is it possible to devise any working plan which will apply with equal effectiveness and equity in communities of compact and of scattered population?

Should, or should not, the principle of self-government be carefully preserved in the whole scheme of legislation to regulate the liquor business?

Whether the present prohibition wave shall wash away the legalized saloon, as ocean waves have from time to time engulfed peninsulas, islands, and whole continents,

depends upon the power of American educators and American officials to answer right such questions as the foregoing. The great danger is that we shall, as usual, overemphasize lawmaking, underemphasize lawbreaking, and go to sleep during the next two or three years when we should be wide-awake and constantly active in seeing that the law is enforced. Unless exactly the same principles of law enforcement are applied in "dry districts" as we have urged for eradication of smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, and adenoids, local and city prohibition are doomed to failure. There must be :

1. Inspection to discover disease centers "blind tigers," etc.

"blind pigs,"

2. Compulsory notification by parents and landlords, and by police and other officials.

3. Prompt investigation upon complaint from private citizens. 4. Prompt removal of the disease and disinfection of the center. 5. Segregation of individual units that disseminate disease, whether bartender, saloon keeper, owner of premises, or respectable wholesaler, none of whom should be permitted to shift to another the responsibility for violating liquor laws.

6. Persistent publicity as to the facts regarding enforcement and violation, so that no one, whether saloon leaguist or antisaloon leaguist, shall be uninformed as to the current results of "dry" laws.

It is perfectly safe to assume that none of these things will be done consistently unless funds are provided to pay one or more persons in each populous locality to give their entire time to the enforcement of laws, just as the improvement of other ills of municipal government require the constant attention of trained investigators. Cogent arguments for such funds have recently appeared in the New York Evening Post's symposium on "How to Give Wisely," by Mrs. Emma Garrett Boyd, of Atlanta, and Miss Salmon, of Vassar College.

If the saloon is here to stay, we must all agree that it is a frightful waste of human energy and of educational momentum to be appealing for its abolition when we might be hastening its proper control. On the other hand, if the saloon is destined to be abolished as a public nuisance and a private wrong, as a menace to industry and social order, is it not a frightful, unforgivable waste of energy to permit prohibition laws to fail, and thus to discredit the principle of prohibition? Philanthropists have provided millions for scientific research, for medical research, for the study of tuberculosis, and for the study of living conditions. It is to be hoped that a large benefaction, or that an aggregation of small benefactions, will apply to governmental attempts to regulate the sale of alcohol those methods of scientific research which have released men from the thraldom of ignorance and diseases less easily preventable than alcoholism.

CHAPTER XXXV

IS IT PRACTICABLE IN PRESENTING TO CHILDREN THE EVILS OF ALCOHOLISM TO TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH?

If children are taught that the most effective way of combating alcoholism is to insure the enforcement of existing laws and to profit from lessons taught by such enforcement; if children are taught that the strongest reasons for total abstinence are social, economic, and industrial rather than individual and physiological, there is much to be gained and little to lose from telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about alcohol. To stimulate a child's imagination by untruths about alcohol is as vicious as to stimulate his body with alcohol. Whisky drinking does not always lead to drunkenness, to physical incapacity, to short life, or to obvious loss of vitality. Beer drinking is not always objected to by employers. Neither crime, poverty, immorality, lack of ambition, nor ignorance can always be traced to alcohol. On the contrary, it is unquestionably true that the majority of the nation's heroes have used alcoholics moderately or excessively for the greater part of their lives. It is probably true that among the hundred most eminent officials, pastors, merchants, professors, and scientists of to-day, the great majority of each class are moderate users of one or more forms of alcoholics. Overeating of potatoes or cake or meat, sleeping or working in ill-ventilated rooms, neglect of constipation, may occasion physiological and industrial