it detrimental to the naval cadets in the service of his navy to use intoxicating liquors, the American people who look well to the peace of their country may likewise take steps to provide for a sober people to engage in the pursuits of peace.

It is charged against the liquor traffic that it is responsible for 50 per cent of the crime in the United States; the German emperor says nine-tenths of the crime in Germany. That is a more severe charge than is made by the advocates of prohibition in the United States; but the emperor of Germany makes that assertion that in his empire intoxicating liquor is responsible for nine-tenths of the crime. Anything that is responsible for so great a percentage of crime ought to be prohibited.

It is claimed that in the United States the traffic in intoxicating liquors is, directly or indirectly, responsible for 25 per cent of the poverty, 37 per cent of the pauperism, 45.8 per cent of child misery, 25 per cent of insanity, 19.5 per cent of divorces, and 50 per cent of the crime. These are grave charges, and

their truth has not been denied.

Intoxicating liquors cost the American people for the year 1913 almost, if not quite, two and one-half billions of dollars. I ask in all candor what the American people got for that enormous sum of money besides poverty, insanity, crime, and misery for women and children? What good did they get? Whom besides the seller was benefited?

Today every great railway company in the country prohibits the use of intoxicating liquors by its employees. Recently the industrial enterprises of the country are following in the lead of the railways and are prohibiting the use of intoxicating liquors by their employees.

A few days ago the Illinois Steel Corporation posted a notice over the gates leading into the shops serving notice that the employees could choose between the job inside and the use of liquor. There is something so deleterious and detrimental and harmful in the use of intoxicating liquors that it is worthy of the serious consideration of the American people. The question is, Is prohibition of the manufacture, importation, and sale the proper means of saving all the people from the harm that comes from the use of intoxicating liquors by some of the people?

Every other means has been tried. The growth of the use of intoxicating liquors in the United States is alarming. It is said that it fell off in the last year or two. Well, the consump

tion of almost everything fell off in the last year or two, but the alarming fact is that there has been an enormous increase in the last half century in the United States in the use of intoxicating liquors. Has it benefited the manhood and the womanhood and the childhood of America? If so, in what respect?

Any scourge that caused injury to the livestock belonging to the American people that the liquor traffic caused to the manhod and womanhood and the childhood of America in 1913 would engage the serious attention of this Congress and of the country, and steps would be taken for the elimination of such a Scourge at any cost.

The people will have to make some sacrifice in a pecuniary way in order to rid themselves of this traffic. It pays a tax of nearly half a billion dollars, just about the same amount that the czar of Russia sacrificed when he prohibited the traffic in his empire. Are the American people willing to do in peace what the czar of Russia did on the threshold of war? It is now a question for their serious consideration and for yours.

Bliss, W. D. P. New Encyclopedia of Social Reform p. 967

Prohibition Prohibits. William P. F. Ferguson

Prohibition, the opposite of permission, is not a synonym of annihilation. Those who say, "prohibition does not prohibit" -a self-contradictory proposition-mean that prohibition does not annihilate. This is manifestly true of all kinds of prohibitions in this world, those of the divine government, of family government, and of civil government alike. Prohibition does not annihilate, not even when it forbids murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and Sunday-work.

Prohibition does not define accomplishment, but only the aim and attitude of government toward wrong. License is a purchased truce-sometimes a surrender; prohibition is a declaration of war. License is an edict of toleration-sometimes a certificate of "good moral character"; prohibition is a proclamation of outlawry. The first requisite of law is justice. A law that sanctions wrong is not law at all, but legislative crime. It is not "public sentiment," but public conscience, out of which law should be quarried. Law is an educator. Dueling, and smuggling, and liquor selling were once in the "best society."

Gradually the law has made them disreputable. Rum-selling under Prohibition is a sneaking fugitive, like counterfeitingnot dead, but disgraced, and so shorn of power.

In Maine children grow up without ever seeing a drunken man. In most parts of Kansas and in Iowa, while the Prohibition law was in force, the law against the saloon is as effective as the law against the brothel or the burglar. To this fact testify governors, senators, congressmen, pastors, physicians, manufacturers—against whose evidence scarcely a witness can be brought in rebuttal except "anonymous." The liquor-dealers' statement that more liquor is consumed under Prohibition than without it is canceled by actions that speak louder than words, by frantic efforts, at great cost, to defeat Prohibition wherever it is proposed.

Congressional Record. 52: 602-9. December 22, 1914

The Truth About Alcohol. Richmond P. Hobson

These convictions are permanent, because they are founded on questions of fact and not of opinion. They revolve about the nature of alcohol, a chemical compound whose properties have been definitely ascertained at the hands of science. Whether members of this House are "wet" or "dry," all should acquaint themselves with the recent findings of science as to what alcohol really is, and the effect it really has upon the human organisms, and through the human organisms the political and social organisms. In other words, Mr. Speaker, the whole question hinges upon the truth about alcohol.

The Good Book tells us, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

I assume, Mr. Speaker, that every member in this House will be loyal to the truth when in his own reason and in his own conscience he has found it. Loyalty to the truth is really the true test of a man, whether he is in the image of his Maker and is worthy of that dignity that attaches to human life above the life of the brute living on the plane of self-preservation.

I realize full well, Mr. Speaker, how with the deceptive properties of alcohol and the powerful financial interests connected with it the average man of today has been molded in an atmosphere of error as to its real nature. The educational

effects of his observation as to the harmful effects of drunkenness have been partly dissipated by the constant reiteration that the harm comes from the abuse and not the temperate use, the results of which do not appear on the surface. As a matter of fact the effect of the moderate use of alcoholic beverages spread over the whole nation has done and is doing vastly more harm than all the drunkenness and intemperance combined.

The substance about which this whole question revolves is a chemical compound of the group of the oxide derivatives of the hydrocarbons, its formula being C2H5(OH), 2 atoms of carbon, 6 of hydrogen, and I of oxygen. Among the other members of this group may be mentioned carbolic acid, chloral hydrate— popularly called chloral-morphine, and strychnine. Alcohol is produced by the process of fermentation, in which process ferment germs devour glucose in solution derived from grain, grapes, and other substances, and in their life processes they throw off waste products like other living organisms. One of the waste products is the gas that causes bubbling. The other waste product is the liquid alcohol. Alcohol is then the toxin, the loathsome excretion of a living organism. It comes under the general law governing toxins, namely, the toxin of one form of life is a poison to the form of life that produced it and a poison to every other form of life of a higher order. The ferment germs are single-cell germs-the lowest form of life known-consequently their toxin, alcohol, is a poison to all forms of life, whether plants, animals, or men-a poison to the elemental protoplasm out of which all forms of life are constructed. The first scientific finding about alcohol is that "alcohol is a protoplasmic poison." An organic substance placed in alcohol is preserved indefinitely, because no living thing-neither germs of decomposition nor the ferment germs themselves-can penetrate the alcohol.

We must therefore surrender all our preconceived ideas about the supposed food value and benefits of alcohol, even in the smallest quantities. As an illustration, one mug of mild beersupposed to be beneficial and helpful-will in thirty minutes lower the efficiency of the average soldier 36 per cent in aiming his rifle.

Alcohol has the property of chloroform and ether of penetrating actually into the nerve fibers themselves, putting the tissues under an anesthetic which prevents pain at first, but

when the anesthetic effect is over discomfort follows throughout the tissues of the whole body, particularly the nervous system, which causes a craving for relief by recourse to the very substance that produced the disturbance. This craving grows directly with the amount and regularity of the drinking.

The poisoning attack of alcohol is specially severe in the cortex cerebrum-the top part of the brain-where resides the center of inhibition, or of will power, causing partial paralysis, which liberates lower activities otherwise held in control, causing a man to be more of a brute, but to imagine that he has been stimulated, when he is really partially paralyzed. This center of inhibition is the seat of the will power, which of necessity declines a little in strength every time partial paralysis takes place.

Thus a man is little less of a man after each drink he takes. In this way continued drinking causes a progressive weakening of the will and a progressive growing of the craving, so that after a time, if persisted in, there must come a point where the will power cannot control the craving and the victim is in the grip of the habit.

When the drinking begins young the power of the habit becomes overwhelming, and the victim might as well have shackles. It is estimated that there are 5,000,000 heavy drinkers and drunkards in America, and these men might as well have a ball and chain on their ankles, for they are more abject slaves than those black men who were driven by slave drivers.

It is vain for us to think that slavery has been abolished. There are nearly twice as many slaves, largely white men, today than there were black men slaves in America at any one time.

These victims are driven imperatively to procure their liquor, no matter at what cost. A few thousand brewers and distillers making up the organizations composing the great liquor trust, have a monopoly of the supply, and they therefore own these 5,000,000 slaves and through them they are able to collect $2,500,000,000 cash from the American people every year.

In this way nearly two-thirds of all the money in circulation in America in the course of a year passes into the hands of the liquor trust.

Very little of the money paid for liquor remains in circulation locally, because liquor employs so few men for the capital invested and pays them such poor wages.