UTAH:

License tax, determined by municipal authorities, not less than $400 per annum.

VERMONT:

First class, to sell at retail, not less than $500 nor more than $1,200; 2d class, to sell liquors of any kind not to be drunk on premises; not less than $750 nor more than $1,500; 3d class, to sell malt liquors, ciders and light wines containing not more than 15 per cent. alcohol, to be drunk on premises, $250; 4th class, to sell at wholesale, $750; fifth class, to sell for medicinal purposes, $10; 6th class, to sell in summer hotels, amount according to length of license; 7th class, to sell malt liquors, cider and light wines containing not more than 15 per cent. alcohol, not to be drunk on premises, $150.

VIRGINIA:

Wholesale traffic in ardent liquors, $450; malt liquors only, at wholesale, $150; malt liquor for license, $200; ardent spirits, retail, $450; each sample liquor merchant is taxed $500; every manufacturer or distiller of liquor shall be taxed according to amount manufactured, from $30 to $300. For manufacturing malt liquors the license is $150, with the privilege of selling the product in quantities of a dozen pints or more in Virginia, except in no-license districts. Every person maintaining a distributing or storage warehouse for malt liquors, not paying manufacturers' license, is taxed $150.

Every person manufacturing pure cider only is taxed $15. Every rectifier, unless rectifying his own manufacture, is taxed $250.

"Malt beverage" may be manufactured only by persons having manufacturers' malt liquor license, and for it an additional tax of $250 is imposed.

WASHINGTON:

Each city, town or county may license the sale of liquor as it sees fit with a license fee of from $300 to $1,000. Wholesale license, $100. A State license fee of $25 is added to that fixed by city, town or county.

WEST VIRGINIA:

Wholesale licenses for malt liquor, $750; for sales of under 500 barrels, 15 cents for each additional barrel. Retail licenses for all drinks, $600; wholesale license, $750 in addition to all other taxes. Wholesale and retail licenses, not to be drunk on the premises, $1,000. Combined license for spirituous and malt liquors, $1,250, and 15 cents for each barrel of beer in excess of $4,000. Municipalities may impose any sum under $750 additional. Club license, according to membership, not exceeding $500.

WISCONSIN:

Special elections may be held in village or town to determine amount to be paid for license on petition of 10 per cent. of the orders. If the license has been $100 it may be increased to $350 or $500. If it has been $200 it may be increased to $500 or $800.

WYOMING:

Retail license fee is $300 and wholesale license $175, but the retail dealer may sell at wholesale without paying additional license.

OF

CHAPTER IV.

SOME, SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE DRINK

QUESTION.

I

ARRESTS FOR DRUNKENNESS.

F all the arguments advanced in speech and writings on different phases of the liquor traffic, the most fallacious is that deduced from statistics of arrests for drunkenness. Yet it is used unreservedly in proof of comparative conditions in regard to inebriety.

If the laws governing arrests for drunkenness were uniform and the same standards of enforcement prevailed one could arrive at comparable results in regard to the visible state of inebriety in different communities. But even then one would have to fall back upon the amount of public intoxication, which may or may not be a true index of sobriety. As a matter of fact, however, the laws governing arrests for drunkenness differ as much in kind as in the manner of their enforcement. Some States have elaborate legislation in regard to arrests for this offense, fortified by city or town ordinances; in other States the matter is left wholly to local regulation. Again in some States and cities arrests are not made on the charge of "simple drunkenness," but on the charge of "disturbing the peace" or for "disorderly conduct," which may or may not spring from intoxication. Very often the last mentioned charges are practically synonymous or of the "blanket" order and may cover a host of minor offenses, especially those against city ordinances which have no direct relation to drunkenness. This circumstance alone should render one very cautious about comparisons.

Another and almost unsurmountable obstacle to correct comparisons is the fact that statistics of arrests reflect public sentiment in regard to methods of dealing with this offense rather than the

volume of public intoxication. If the sentiment of a community, reinforced by ample legislation, demands that all persons visibly under the influence of liquor shall be removed from the street or public place, the fact must inevitably manifest itself in a larger ratio of arrests than in a community less actuated by such public sentiment or where arrests are made only on the charge of disorderly conduct. It is often observed that in the same community the rate of arrests fluctuates violently from one year to another, not in keeping with a rise or fall in the actual volume of public intoxication, but in obedience to demands for rigid or lenient police

measures.

These truisms must be kept in mind by any one utilizing statistics of arrests. They find abundant illustration in the next table. It deals with arrests for drunkenness and for disturbing the peace (including disorderly conduct) during 1905 in cities of over 30,000 population, and is drawn from the United States Census report published in 1907. It is the latest source of official information on this subject.

The table shows that in cities too numerous for individual mention the arrests for disturbing the peace, as in the case of Baltimore, may be about four times as numerous as the arrests for drunkenness, a circumstance which vitiates comparisons with cities where arrests are made almost exclusively for drunkenness.

Of far greater import is the consideration that these statistics of arrests indicate the status in regard to prosecutions for the offenses of drunkenness, and not the prevailing amount of public intoxication. Thus in Boston, where drunkenness is declared a "crime" and a strong public sentiment exists in favor of placing intoxicated persons under arrest, the number of such arrests reached the astounding ratio of 5430.8 per 10,000 population, or, adding the offenses classified as disturbing the peace, a ratio of 5552.9. On the other hand, St. Louis, with a slightly larger population, shows a ratio for both classes of offenses of only 2078.7. Is Boston, notwithstanding its statutory limitation of saloons and stricter enforcement of liquor laws, twice as drunken as St. Louis? Or, what weight can be given comparisons ignoring the fact that nearly one-half of the arrests in Boston were of non-residents chargeable upon surrounding no-license towns? It would be waste of space to multiply examples of this kind which merely illustrate the sheer absurdity of hard and fast comparisons.

It follows that deductions concerning the comparative merits of high and low license are meaningless, or that when based upon arrests for drunkenness they enable one to prove one side or the other, according to the examples chosen for purposes of illustration. Thus low-license Milwaukee yields a rate of arrests for drunkenness and for disturbing the peace of but 1329.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, which may be contrasted with a rate of 3164.5 for high-license Buffalo, N. Y. On the other hand, comparisons, for instance, of high-license Detroit with low-license New Orleans would lead one to conclude that drunkenness is much more prevalent under a low-license system. Both deductions would be equally fallacious.

As between communities where the liquor traffic is under some form of license, statistics of arrest for drunkenness serve only to illustrate the divergence of laws and standards of enforcing laws intended for the repression of public intoxication.

Self-evidently, numerous arrests for drunkenness could hardly take place unless the liquor habit had taken root more or less. But also in this respect the statistics may be subject to a variety of interpretations, even if the numerical proportions are alike. How much of the drunkenness exhibited by the statistics of arrests is due to accidental intoxication, how much portrays confirmed drink habits, whether in one set of figures a large proportion of recurrent cases are represented and in another set few, etc.-—all these matters are beyond our ken. They could only be brought out through intensive study, and even then their exact interpretation would be exceedingly difficult unless due weight is given the racial and social conditions of the population of a community, their habits in regard to the use of intoxicants, etc. It is perfectly well known, for instance, that public intoxication is more common in a community given to the use of spirits than in a community where malt liquors are chiefly consumed.

ARRESTS FOR

DRUNKENNESS

IN NO-LICENSE AND PROHIBITION
CITIES.

To decipher the meaning of the statistics under consideration when the sale of liquor has a legal status, is one thing. To use such statistics as a measure of the visible effects of a no-license regime, is quite another, and within limits permissible. It is natural, but not always true, that in no-license cities special effort should be made to clear the highways and byways of drunken persons, and