(Register, Mobile, Ala., Dec. 24, 1914—Dem.)

VOTE ON AMENDMENT

"There is, however, quite as much reason to believe that the vote registered the high tide of a movement looking to the transfer to the general government of a police power now recognized as belonging to the states. There is a very deeply ingrained belief among the people that the principle of state government in matters domestic and federal affecting all the states and our foreign relations, is sound; that this form of government is a defence against the rise of despotism; and that under it the states have every inducement to remain in the Union and none to separate from it."

(Advertiser, Montgomery, Ala., Dec. 20, 1914-Dem.)

SENATOR SHEPPARD, LOGICIAN AND STATESMAN

"If fanatical zeal can take free thinking Americans to the point of approving the seizing and searching of other Americans' homes in the quest of liquor-which will be done under the SheppardHobson amendment-we shall ask that our bluejackets fire a salute to the Sultan, and invite him to send over a commission to some favorite representative in America, the ex-Democracy."

(Evening Farmer, Bridgeport, Conn., Dec. 24, 1914-Dem.) THE VOTE ON HOBSON'S AMENDMENT

"The use of alcohol is so entrenched in human habit and custom as to make it probable that the use could not be entirely abated even by the national government until there is a further very large increase in the number of those who favor prohibition.'

(Evening Farmer, Bridgeport, Conn., Dec. 26, 1914-Dem.)

TWO EXAMPLES OF POOR ARGUMENT

"The question of liquor is a social question. If it is wrong, the wrong, is in the whole state.

"The institution is on trial. But the institution does not exist because of a few bad men. It exists because nearly all men have used alcohol from the beginning of civilization.

"It is the habits and the customs of society that are under

scrutiny. Those habits and those customs must greatly change before the manufacture and sale of alcohol can be effectually prevented by legislation."

(Standard, Bridgeport, Conn., Dec. 23, 1914-Rep.)

NATIONAL PROHIBITION BEFORE CONGRESS

"To substitute national for State control of the primary concerns of ordinary life would be a radical and dangerous break with the established principles of American institutions. To endeavor to impose prohibition upon the unwilling population of great states and of the largest cities of the country would have the most demoralizing consequences."

(Courant, Hartford, Conn., Dec. 24, 1914-Rep.)

NOW SOBER DOWN

"The only method by which you can advance a community, a state or a nation in stable morality is by taking them man by man and making the individual better. This is a slow process-too slow for the prohibitionists. To wait for this natural process to work itself out puts them in a frenzy, and so they turn to the compulsion of law a kind of compulsion which differs only in form from the compulsion of the bayonet, and which in the last analysis carried through by the bayonet, although in orderly lands, like ours, the bayonet is not seen. The fact that the compulsion of law is unable to make anybody good; that when it runs counter to personal rights which our people firmly believe that they possess, and which the mass of them actually exercise, it turns communities of lawabiding people into communities of law-breaking people; and that therefore, this compulsion does not bring the millennium any nearer, but really shoves the millennium further into the futureall this the prohibitionist overlooks or obstinately disregards."

(Courant, Hartford, Conn., Dec. 23, 1914-Rep.)

THE PROHIBITION SPURT

"Is it not militarism in the real sense that Mr. Hobson and his prohibition friends are now trying to set up in this country by their proposed amendment of the Constitution of the United States?

Their notion is that they have a majority of the people of this country on their side; and granting this assumptior for the sake of the argument, although we seriously doubt that it is a fact, they propose to compel all who differ with them to do exactly as they decree.

"Of course we have no idea that this prohibition scheme can be carried through. The prohibitionists may desire to take no further chances with human nature, but the rest of us believe differently. Human nature is the raw material of states and nations, and if our schools and churches and newspapers and books cannot handle it in this century, and train and discipline it into trustworthy and efficient manhood and womanhood as they have done in former centuries, than all hands had better throw up the sponge and quit. For law itself does not and cannot make people better. Law is for the mass, and you cannot teach sobriety and selfcontrol and self-respect by wholesale. Even in so favorable a community as Maine prohibition has bred more lawbreakers than any other single cause. What it would do in the entire United States is appalling to contemplate. The whole thing is foolish and mischievous, but fortunately it is also futile."

(Times, Hartford, Conn., Dec. 23, 1914-Dem.)
HOBSON'S HOBBIES

"Of course attention was called by more than one of the speakers to the enormous cost of the proposed undertaking, and to the probability that it would fail in the purpose of stopping the sale and use of intoxicating liquors. These things are matter of common notoriety in states where prohibition is declared to exist. That is within the power of law as the action of a state within which alone it applies, but the notion that any prohibition law ends the sale of liquor is laughed at by those who know conditions. In a few places and for a limited time it may be that a prohibition law is actually enforced, but such are known to be exceptions to the common rule. Too much evidence has been presented to leave doubt on this point.

"But it is not the inutility of the prohibition contemplated by Mr. Hobson that condemns it so much as the fact that it is a more or less open attack on the principle of home rule in states and towns."

(Herald, New Britain, Conn., Dec. 23, 1914-Ind.)

PROHIBITION BEATEN

"National prohibition has been killed, temporarily at least and it is a good thing for the country that it is so, because its promoters proposed unwise legislation and a law which could never be enforced and which would take from the government a very large amount of revenue."

(Register, New Haven, Conn., Dec. 23, 1914-Ind.)

AN ARTIFICIAL EFFORT FAILS

"So long as there is one state whose peculiar conditions are such that the majority of its people do not think prohibition would be wise, that state should not have prohibition forced upon it."

(Democrat, Waterbury, Conn., Dec. 16, 1914-Dem.)

THE BUGABOOS OF CONGRESS

"There isn't much use granting the franchise to a community that doesn't want it or won't fight for it, and there isn't much use imposing prohibition on a state that prefers license."

(News, Wilmington, Del., Dec. 24, 1914-Rep.)

RUM

"It would be better to have the states, districts of the states, deal with the rum question. It is sometimes very troublesome and often impossible to 'save' men who persistently refuse to be 'saved,' especially if those men do not think they are sinners."

(Herald, Washington, D. C., Dec. 22, 1914-Ind.)

NOT A NATIONAL ISSUE

"It belongs in the states, the counties, the cities and the towns, where a free electorate can regulate by law and by public opinion the morals of each community."

(Times Union, Jacksonville, Fla., Dec. 18, 1914-Dem.)

BREAKING THE RULES OF THE GAME

"Is it desirable to deprive the states of their police duties? Is it wise to force upon a reluctant people by authority of the

federal government a condition which they have declined or failed to adopt of their own volition? Is it not true that prohibition can be made effective only when it is supported by public opinion, and is not any effort at compulsion certain to set public opinion in opposition?"

(Journal Gazette), Fort Wayne, Ind., Dec. 24, 1914-Dem.)

THE HOBSON RESOLUTION

"The Hobson resolution was defeated in Congress, not because the majority of the congressmen are friendly to the liquor interests, but because the majority of the congressmen believe, and rightly, that the question of prohibition is a question to be settled by the people of each state."

(Star, Indianapolis, Ind., Dec. 24, 1914-Ind.)

THE FALLACY OF PROHIBITION

"Reduced to its lowest and simplest terms, the prohibition philosophy is this: That because some men get drunk, nobody shall take a drink; that because the defective wills cannot use the wines and liquors of civilization in moderation, therefore no one may indulge in them at all. A world is to be made strong, not through discipline, experience, training and the development of mental power through use, but by removing temptation so as to preclude the possibility of yielding."

"All along through history there have been impatient souls that crave to reform man through enforced abstinence. Asceticism, as applied to individual conduct, has been tried over and over again, but it has failed, because it is not nature's way."

(Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, Ia., Dec. 25, 1914—Ind.)

HOBSON AMENDMENT LOSES

"Imagine the number of officers every state would require to see that liquor, legal for sacramental, medicinal, pharmaceutical, etc., purposes was not used for beverage purposes. Imagine the right of search and the army of federal sleuths that would be necessary in the effort to legislate morals into the community. The amendment itself is a makeshift, impossible within reason of enforcement and would have a tendency to bring all law into disregard."