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spection and grading, and will gladly co-operate with the Government to make federal inspection effective. With this as an inducement the farmers will endeavor to raise barley according to the best grades, and they will soon have their own cleaning machinery, and will have cleaning devices installed with the thrashing machines which will automatically clean and separate all admixtures. The residue they can use as their own by-product instead of giving it to the mixers and blenders for nothing, and being docked for it in the price.

PENALIZED BARLEY DOCKAGE BEFORE PUTTING ON GRADE

Under federal inspection and grading all sound barley with an established test weight per bushel should be graded malting barley and grouped into commercial grades regardless of admixtures, subject, however, to legal penalized dockage for the admixtures before putting on the grade, the dockage to be legal compensation to the grain dealer for the cleaning and extra room required. Penalized dockage under Government regulation will be fair to the dealer and producer alike, and certainly will be a protection and will make it very profitable to the farmer who really wants to market reasonably clean and better barley as well as other grain.

THE PRACTICAL REMEDY TO OVERCOME PRESENT CONDITIONS

The real practical remedy is standardization of barley grades. Federal barley standards handled under Government supervision is the remedy, pure and simple, to overcome the present system of irregular inspection and grading, as well as the irregular expert mixing and blending. In order to overcome the allied opposition which is busy in every direction trying to block the enactment of grain standardization, it is absolutely necessary to enlist the active and effective assistance of the granges, various farmers' organizations, individual farmers and others. This can readily be done, and much has already been accomplished in this direction with the assistance of your Crop Improvement Committee. However, the work has only been begun, and will take considerably more time, effort and money to bring about the desired results. But it can be done, and now is the time to do it.

EXPORTS OF BARLEY AND OATS FROM THE UNITED STATES, YEARS ENDING JUNE 30, 1912-1914, AND FOR THE MONTHS OF JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER,

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The above is taken from Farmers' Bulletin 629, U. S. Department of Agriculture.

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SOME ASPECTS OF THE LIQUOR PROBLEM 1 [Reprinted from NATIONAL MUNICIPAL REVIEW, Vol. III, No. 3, July, 1914]

JOHN KOREN 2

The existence of a world-wide movement against the abuse of intoxicating liquors is a patent fact. Variously manifested, it has made its way into all civilized lands. It absorbs more human energy than is devoted to any other form of social betterment. But the driving power of the movement is not so easy to discover, for it is not everywhere hitched up to the same kind of motor. Nor can it be said to be given a uniform direction. Consciousness of the menace from an unchecked abuse of drink gave the movement its first impulse. Alarm from the same cause still furnishes propelling force, but that by itself would be insufficient. In its best expression the movement does not so much signify dread because of conditions becoming worse as a keen sense of responsibility for the common welfare. Its growing strength in the countries where the greatest progress has been made in the direction of sobriety confirms this.

Extremists will of course continue to declaim about a world growing drunker and drunker. It is a convenient argument in whipping up a flagging interest in their panacea-universal prohibitionin spite of damaging and almost hopeless admission involved, that the unremitting labor of years for temperance has largely been unproductive. But the backbone of the movement is not calamity howling; therefore, it is not necessary to support it by marshalling evidence about comparative conditions of sobriety or inebriety. In passing it may be said, however, that the gaps of ignorance about

1 See also articles by Mr. Koren on "The International Committee for the Scientific Study of the Alcohol Question," Vol. II, page 275, and "The Status of Liquor License Legislation," Vol. II, page 629.

2 Mr. Koren was an expert for the Committee of Fifty of which Dr. Charles W. Eliot, James C. Carter, the first president of the National Municipal League, and Seth Low were among the moving spirits. He is now secretary of the American section of the International Committee for the Scientific Study of the Alcohol Question, and a member of the National Municipal League's committee on the municipal liquor problem.-EDITOR.

the situation are so great that even one endowed with a competent sense of fact finds hard and fast conclusions barred on all sides. And by uncritically accepting current statements about the consumption of alcohol as portraying actual abuse, one can "prove" the impossible. Thus it might be shown that the notably sober countries of Europe, such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, are really the most drunken, since, forsooth, their per capita consumption, translated into terms of pure alcohol, tops that of nearly all others. Take another example. Recent press dispatches picture Russia as par excellence a land of sots; and they may tell the truth, although the fine hand of the politician is plainly visible in them. Yet the latest official returns for European Russia indicate a per capita consumption of spirits considerably below that of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria-Hungary and Argentina, not to mention France. In brief, the available means of gauging relative conditions in respect to the use of alcohol are very faulty and inadequate; so much so that the International Statistical Institute has recently thought it necessary to establish a commission to study the subject and devise improved methods of presentation.

Meanwhile, it is not material to this discussion whether certain absolutists reason without the facts or on the basis of manufactured evidence. At all events, the world-movement against the drink abuse does not need to be bolstered up by exaggerations. Its paramount strength comes from the spreading conviction that the abuse of drink is a menace which must be counteracted, a conviction springing from a clearer perception of social duty and not necessarily associated with any belief in patented methods by which such duty alone can be discharged.

A keen realization of the drink evil is quite compatible with the view that persistent, if slow, progress is being made in counteracting it. One must be an incorrigible pessimist or a professional agitator to deny that the liquor problem has reached a vastly better status than it occupied some generations ago. To all others it is tolerably plain that the forces of education, improved social customs, the new demands of industrial organization, the better understanding of health questions, no longer permit us to condone an attitude toward the drink question which formerly passed unchallenged. Among other evidence on this point may be cited the present position of the trade, at least in this country, which no longer is one of aggression, but of constructive defence, carrying with it an admis

sion of a need of vigorous and clean control of an "inherently dangerous traffic."

The implication is by no means that we should leave well enough alone. Only a superficial optimist can find contentment with present conditions. The question what should be done for continued improvement is still pertinent, but over it those who should work together for the same end are split asunder. In European countries, the weight of the temperance movement is directed against abuse, chiefly by the aid of legislative and educational expedients; and coupled with it is a live personal abstinence agitation. To be sure, an extreme wing is not wanting. There are well-defined groups of prohibitionists in many lands. But their demand for the ultimate extinction of the manufacture and sale of drink has not blinded them to the usefulness of restrictive and regulative measures. They may be found patiently helping their governments to formulate such measures, realizing that true progress is but gained by successive steps. They still acknowledge that the many-sided liquor problem requires study, and that in dealing with it one must be guided by reason and not blindly follow sentiment.

In the United States, those who would be the exclusive leaders in temperance work seem to have passed beyond the study stage. To them it must sound like an echo from a by-gone day that a wellknown temperance organization in Russia recently offered a prize of ten thousand dollars for the best draft of a law to govern the liquor traffic. They deny that there can be any other road to public sobriety than the straight path of prohibition. Those who think and dare to say that it does not lead to a millennium are commonly stigmatized as the spokesmen of evil and in league with every antisocial force. Efforts at scientific inquiry of any phase of the liquor question are more or less suspected. Instead we are asked to accept ready-made dicta without questioning their worth. In plain truth, the direction of the anti-alcohol movement in the United States appears to have fallen largely into the hands of a professional group of advocates who cannot afford to bide by an appeal to reason. This unsugared statement does not carry with it any disparagement of the thousands who follow them from convictions and unmixed motives, much less a denial of the undoubted benefits from the temperance movement in its purer forms which has been indispensable to progress.

This world-movement has, broadly speaking, had a double pur

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