find and arrest the occupant. The duty of a sheriff had not been held to go that far in Tennessee before. And if the sheriff does not discharge his duty as thus laid down he may be ousted from office. Sheriff Riechman was, therefore, ousted because he did not raid places in Memphis that were "suspected" of carrying on an illicit liquor traffic.

Carrying this decision to its logical conclusion, a sheriff can be deprived of his office in Tennessee if he fails to raid every business house or private residence that may be "suspected" by prohibition agitators and paid spotters in the employ of the Anti-Saloon League. The home has been stripped of its previous constitutional rights. It is no longer a castle in which its owner may feel safe from search and seizure.

The ouster law is regarded by thoughtful people in Tennessee as the abolition of magna caart, in that it puts judicial dictum above constitutional rights and nullifies decisions of the people at the ballot-box. While the ouster case against Mayor Crump of Memphis was pending the people of that city elected him to a third term as mayor. The courts held that he could not serve in the office of mayor again because he had been ousted under the law. Thus, the courts nullified the rights of the people to choose their officials at the ballot-box. To show their contempt for the whole business, the people of Shelby county at the August election elected Crump to the office of county trustee, an office that the ouster law does not reach. The office of mayor of Memphis paid him $300 a month. The office of county trustee is worth $40,000 a year. This incident is related to show the deep resentment, and the contempt, in which ouster laws are held in those communities of Tennessee that oppose prohibition. And if those communities were removed from the State there would not be enough left to compose a respectable Central American republic.

A writer could extend this review indefinitely, for the records of Southern Prohibition States are full of the quandries in which the State finds itself in its efforts to enforce monstrous laws. Enough has been cited already to show the general drift of legislation and court proceedings in that prohibition territory. To say that these revolutionary laws and surprising court opinions have improved

conditions anywhere in the prohibition South, would be to bring down the ridicule of every open, unbiased mind. Instead of improving conditions, the South is worse off, morally, spiritually and materially.

ALCOHOL AND CRIME

By Robert Blackwood

(In The Forum, August, 1916)

That the use of alcoholic beverages is the chief cause of crime is an assertion constantly made by the advocates of prohibitory laws. The percentage of crimes alleged to be due to this cause is variously stated as from seventy to ninety per cent, but all prohibitionists agree that liquor-drinking is the principal source of crime. So persistent have been their statements to this effect that their iteration and reiteration have created a widespread and deep-rooted belief in their truth. The general public, seeing these assertions made without contradiction, has accepted them as a matter of course, so that the average citizen, if asked whether he thought that drink is largely responsible for our criminals, would unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative. If pressed for the basis for his opinion, the usual answer would be: "Why, everybody knows that the use of liquor is the cause of crime."

The origin for this popular belief concerning the relation of drinking to crime is to be found in the natural desire of the criminal to avoid responsibility for his wrongful acts. The man of weak will or crooked tendencies, who violates the laws that society has made for its protection, hopes to create sympathy by saying, "I was not to blame; drink weakened my will and led me to commit this crime." When it was found that credulous juries and judges were inclined to look upon a criminal's drinking habits as a reason for leniency, the plea became highly popular, so that in course of time it became the customary thing for a prisoner to say: "I was drunk," or "drink made me a criminal." Al Jennings, the Oklahoma train robber, relates in his autobiography that his fellow prisoners always told the warden or visitors that liquor was the cause of their going wrong, but that in private conversation with him they would admit that this was only a "gag" to enlist sympathy, and help to get them out of jail sooner.

CONFUSING CAUSE WITH COINCIDENT

A second reason why the use of liquor is popularly associated with crime is the indisputable fact that many men who commit crimes drink liquors. The simple statement of fact that eighty per cent of all the adult males use some kind of alcoholic beverages, shows that according to the law of averages a large percentage of criminals must be drinkers. But there is absolutely nothing to establish a connection between their drinking habits and their criminal traits. The mere fact that a criminal drinks does not prove that drinking made him a criminal. The notion that it does arises from the careless habit of thinking that because a certain fact is coexistent with a certain condition, the fact is the cause of the condition. The same loose reasoning applied to other facts yields some startling conclusions. For instance the most of criminals are white-therefore a white skin causes crime. Absurd, of course, and yet if the mere fact that criminals drink is to be deemed proof that drinking made them criminals, by a parity of reasoning, their pigmentation is equally responsible for the criminal tendencies of white men.

The report of the New York State Commission of Prisons for the year 1914 (Page 557) shows that of the total number of persons admitted to the various prisons during that year, 99 per cent. had received religious instruction in their youth. What would be thought of an unbeliever in religion who should claim that religious training is the cause of crime? Yet there are the facts. Ninetynine per cent of New York State's criminals received religious instruction. According to prohibition logic this instruction made them criminals.

To take another illustration: the same report shows that of all admissions to prisons in New York State in the year 1914 more than ninety per cent could read and write. Will any one pretend that the capacity to read and write made them criminals? To even suggest such an explanation makes it ridiculous. Yet it is exactly on a par with the prohibitionist claim that because some criminals drink, liquor makes criminals.

WHY ARE NOT ALL DRINKERS CRIMINALS?

Convincing proof that liquor-drinking does not cause crime is found in the statistics relating to the number of persons who drink, and the number of criminals. As stated above, at least eighty per cent of the adult male population of New York State uses liquor. There are nearly 3,000,000 adults in that State, of whom 2,400,000 drink. The report of the State Commission of Prisons (Page 554) for 1914, gives the number of males sentenced to imprisonment after conviction during that year as 19,293, or less than ONE per cent. Two million four hundred thousand men drink. Of these less than one per cent commit crimes. If liquor makes criminals of the one per cent, why does it not have the same effect on the ninety-nine per cent? Or to put it another way: if the use of liquor causes one per cent of the drinkers to become criminals, does it keep the ninety-nine per cent virtuous? How can drink be held to be the cause of crime, if it affects less than one per cent of the men who use it?

WEAK WILLS AND STRONG DRINK

The prohibitionist reply to the figures above quoted is that liquor only makes criminals of people with weak wills, and that this is the reason why such a small percentage of the liquor users are criminals. If this is true, does it not show that it is the lack of moral character, or of self-control, that leads both to excessive drinking, and to crime? That ninety-nine per cent of liquor drinkers are not criminals proves that it is the weak will of the one per cent that is responsible for their criminal acts. If drinking liquor was of itself the cause of crime, all drinkers should be criminals. When the prohibitionists say that liquor-drinking makes criminals only of the weak-willed, they admit that it is weakness of will that is the source of crime.

Even though it could be clearly shown that liquor-drinking is a factor in lessening self-control, this would not explain why a few people are injuriously affected, while ninety-nine per cent are not. It is a fair conclusion that if only one per cent of liquor users are