white, there has been a continuous increase in the per capita consumption of intoxicants. The statistical abstract of the United States census gives 4.17 gallons as the per capita consumption of all liquors in 1840. This figure rises to 16.72 gallons in 1891, 17.76 in 1900, and from 1906 to the present it hovers between 21 and 23 gallons per capita. It is interesting to note that while there was an increase of approximately six gallons per capita in the decade from 1880 to 1890, in the past twenty-six years there has been no more than a six gallon increase. This is some slight sign of a gain, but it would seem that with constantly extending no-license area and population there should be an absolute decrease in consumption. However, this is not the case, for while the population of the United States increased 350 per cent since 1850, the per capita liquor consumption increased 456 per cent. Further, while the population of the United States increased from 76 millions in 1900 to 92 millions in 1910, or 21 per cent, the total liquor consumption increased from 13 billions to over two billions of gallons, or 50 per cent. In this decade, then, consumption increased more than twice as fast as population.

Consequently, with the peculiar situation that the consumption of intoxicating liquors is constantly increasing concomitant with a rapidly growing area and population living under no-license laws, we are driven to one of the following conclusions:

1. The ever decreasing population remaining under license shows an astounding propensity to increase its liquor consumption. It is not our experience that wet sections are becoming wetter.

2. Internal revenue collectors are continuing to show a slow and regular increase in efficiency in the detection of the manufacture and sale of liquor. This circumstance has probably accounted for some of the increase shown in government tables in the past, but its effect at present would seem to be a minimum.

3. The drier we become, the more liquor we consume.

It is clear, therefore, that the liquor question is far from being settled. Indeed from the facts here presented it would appear that we are not even on the right road to final solution of the problem. According to the Prohibition Year Book for 1915, page 13.

"The 1915 statistics show a total consumption of liquor practically equal to that of any previous year of our history. The latest available government reports show greater investments of money, and more men employed in the liquor business, and allied industries, than any statistics heretofore published. Current political history shows the traffic to be as strongly entrenched in our politics and our national government as it has ever been, and probably stronger than ever before. These facts obtain in spite of the tremendous anti-liquor agitation and the widespread movement against the saloon."

Indeed,

"There have been concomitant evils of prohibitory legislation. The efforts to enforce it during forty years past have had some unlooked-for effects upon public respect for courts, judicial procedure, oaths, and law in general, and for officers of the law, legislators, and public servants. The public have seen law defied, a whole generation of habitual law-breakers schooled in evasion and shamelessness, courts ineffective through fluctuation of policy, delays, perjuries, negligences, and other miscarriages of justice, officers of the law double-faced and mercenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypocritical and truckling, and office holders unfaithful to pledges and to reasonable public expectation. Through an agitation which has always had a moral end, these immoralities have been developed and made conspicuous.” *

Furthermore, prohibition encourages the consumption of the heavier liquors which can be more easily transported. The constant agitation of the question tends to discourage reputable men from entering the business. But worst of all prohibition is wholly negative. It considers neither the necessity of substitutes for the saloon nor the problem of the gradual development of improved standards of living. It looks askance at all propositions to encourage the use of lighter beverages by progressive taxation. In fine, what social development shows can only come safely and surely *President Elliot in Introduction to Studies of Committee of Fifty.

by a gradual process of evolution, prohibition would achieve by revolution.

"What the future may hold in store we can only forecast from the present, and, so far, unfortunately, the promises of prohibition have far outstripped performance. Some day, no doubt, society will be ready for measurement by new standards; but until then progress is not made by adding new evils to those that now burden us.” † † John Koren, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1916.