of the responsibility and our share of the losses, settle with our partners, and all parties engage in some better business, even though not quite as profitable."

AN ASSERTION DISMISSED

Further in his pamphlet, Mr. Gibboney considers and dismisses the assertion that liquor dealers engage in and carry on their business with the knowledge that they run the risk of encountering prohibition at any time. "It will not satisfy fair-minded men," he declares, "for the opponents of the liquor business to say: 'Oh! the liquor dealers cannot blame anybody but themselves—they took a chance and if they lose their large cash investments in the wicked liquor business it is their own fault.' It is unthinkable that a business man would invest $10,000, $15,000 or $1,000,000 in a business if notified it was a short-lived scheme or an experiment. If one business man could be found to be so foolish we know the thousands of other business men considering liquor selling as a business who would not be. The positive plain truth is no other is—no business in the history of this country and of this State was ever given such support or surrounded with such strong safeguards as the liquor business, and this was done for no other reason than it has always been the one big money-making scheme in which State and Nation expected to make its big profits."

AN IMMORAL BASIS

In a recent issue of Case and Comment, there was published an able article by Lee J. Vance entitled "Some Fundamental Errors of Our Anti-Saloon Laws." In this article Mr. Vance points out: "There have been two leading errors which, ab initio, discredit or vitiate the great bulk of our anti-liquor legislation. The one is the assumption that all the people, the temperate as well as the intemperate, must be legislated into sobriety at any cost. The other is the implication that confiscation without compensation is conducive to public welfare, health, safety and good order. In the first case, the basis of the legislation is assumed to be moral; in the second the basis is distinctly immoral. Anti-liquor legislation in both cases is fundamentally wrong."

PURCHASE OF PROPERTIES ADVOCATED

Mr. Roger W. Babson, the noted American financial writer, in one of his articles widely published in newspapers throughout the United States, during June, 1915, presented a definite plan urging the purchase of liquor properties. "Personally," he says, “I am a total abstainer and have always voted the no-license ticket, but I cannot sympathize with the uneconomic and impractical plans of the enthusiastic temperance workers. In this world we must adapt ourselves to conditions and not to theories." Mr. Babson stated that the facts supplied to him relative to the economic side of the liquor question in the United States showed that the capital invested directly in the manufacture of beer and liquor of all kinds was more than $600,000,000, distributed as follows: Malt liquors, $525,000,000; distilled liquors, $50,000,000; wines, $25,000,000. The total number of wage earners employed in the manufacture of beer and liquor was about 56,000.

The Report of the United States Bureau of the Census for the year 1909 the latest available Report-gives these figures:

Number of employes in the above manufactures . . . 73,821 These figures do not, of course, include the amount of capital invested in the retail trade, the fixtures and furnishings alone in which represent a conservatively estimated $421,601,380. There are also in the retail trade more than 400,000 employes and about 250,000 proprietors of all kinds.

A FALLACY REPEATED

Mr. Babson's plan, however, does not deal with the retail trade, nor with the agricultural interests and laborers dependent upon the manufacture of malt liquors, distilled liquors or wines, nor with the capital invested in, and workers employed by allied manufacturers and trades. The plan formulated by Mr. Babson concerns itself solely with the manufacturers. Mr. Babson professes

to see in the "existence of the liquor traffic" the main cause of taxation for charities, reformatories, municipal police protection, judiciary and private charities, and therefore he favors its abolition.

But, it may be parenthetically said, official analyses of municipal budgets show that the contention that liquor causes a heavy taxation for the foregoing purposes is merely a well-circulated fallacy often repeated but without adequate foundation.

In New York City there are many thousands of saloons, yet an official leaflet issued in 1915 by Comptroller William A. Prendergast shows that of every $100 in taxes, only $8.25 is spent for the police department; only $5.02 for all judicial purposes, including civil courts and processes; only $4.96 for charities, private and state; and only 68 cents for city prisons, penitentiaries, etc.

FACTS SHOWN BY UNITED STATES CENSUS REPORTS

Bulletin No. 126, issued by the Census Bureau of the United States Government, and entitled "Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000: 1913," gives data concerning the municipal budgets of 199 cities in the United States. The following tables, which are set forth in Bulletin No. 126 as the aggregate for the entire 199 cities, show what a small proportion of the whole expenditures is required to be spent for functions and institutions dealing with crime, pauperism and other such factors: