$27,000 went to pay salaries, printing the American Issue and traveling expenses of officials. So too in Minnesota there is a bitter fight between the League and the Methodist church temperance society. The Anti-Saloon League in Ohio handles a large amount of money. It is supported by hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe to its organ and through the churches and in other ways help to support the League, and there should never be any occasion to demand an investigation. The public are entitled to a full and complete statement of all the funds it receives and how they are expended."

Dr. Samuel W. Dickie, of Albion College, Albion, Mich., took a stand against the Anti-Saloon League at the recent conference of the Methodist Episcopal church in Minneapolis. He opposed removing the headquarters of the church temperance society from Chicago to Topeka, Kan., as a plan in the interest of the League. He was finally overruled after a most acrimonious debate, in which Purley A. Baker, of Westville, Ohio, general superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, denied certain charges made against him.

At a recent meeting of the Prohibition State Committee of Pennsylvania, resolutions were adopted condemning local option and warning "all voters and all churches against the mistaken and deceptive methods of the Anti-Saloon League." The resolutions state that, "though the League claims nearly half the territory of the nation as 'dry' through local option, yet there was more liquor sold in the country last year than in any previous year and there never has been and is not now a foot of 'dry' territory in the States, except where prohibition officials have been elected by the Prohibition Party to execute the 'dry' laws."

That the Wisconsin Anti-Saloon League is unworthy of support and confidence is declared in resolutions adopted by Golden Circle District No. 1, Independent Order of Good Templars of Racine, Wis. The resolutions, in part, say that the Anti-Saloon League "has carried on its operations in this country for the past eighteen years; its purpose supposed to be the destruction of the liquor traffic; its methods of destroying the traffic having been tried for seventy-five years and having everywhere proven a failure; it having taken numerous collections of money from temperance people and devoted a large share thereof to paying unnecessarily large salaries to its officials; that it has become a hindrance and a stumbling block in the way of a correct solution of the drink evil.”

TRUE TEMPERANCE.

Commenting on an address by Mayor Gaynor in which he referred to the growth of sobriety in this country, the New York World says:

"To many prohibitionists this will seem a hard saying. . .Yet saying...Yet the Mayor is right. The very strength of the Prohibition party and the general acceptance of many of the Prohibition doctrines by other parties are themselves evidence that a great change has come over the people in this respect, and that we do not need to-day the stringent restrictions that were demanded to check the excesses of old. It must be gratifying to every citizen that the Mayor was able to say that a distinguished official from Scotland had told him that after a month's stay in New York he had not seen a drunken man. That would have astounded Father Mathew."

The World has heretofore justly attributed the growth of true temperance to the ever-increasing use of beer in lieu of the stronger stimulants. No end of testimony could be presented in favor of beer as an agent of sobriety. The following is taken from the report of James A. Duncan, representative of the American Federation of Labor at Budapest, Hungary, at the International Trades Convention, August, 1911:

"Munich is fairly well organized, and the workers deserve credit and encouragement. This is the great beer brewing center in Europe. Its beer gardens, like those in Vienna, mean something different than the mere words convey here. Thither poor families, carrying their meagre luncheon with them, repair in the evening to eat, sip the local beverage, listen to music, and to put in the evening in domestic and fraternal exchange of views with whomsoever they may meet, and their richer neighbor from an outlaying boulevard may be occupying the next table. These resorts constitute the domestic method of such commingling of the classes as takes place over there.

"I cannot help it if it jolts our temperance friends to say that, generally speaking, on the continent of Europe where wine and beer are consumed, and where the places dispensing them are seldom, if ever, closed, intemperance in the use of intoxicating drinks is almost unknown."

REV. DR. BAGNELL'S BOOK.

The bias of the special pleader is everywhere revealed in "Economic and Moral Aspects of the Liquor Business," a book recently brought out by the Rev. Dr. Bagnell, President of the New York Anti-Saloon League. As a contribution to the literature of the sub

ject Dr. Bagnell's work is of negligible value, mainly for the reason mentioned. Perhaps no man in the author's position could do better -the presidency of the Anti-Saloon League is hardly compatible, in regard to such a subject, with the requisite degree of impartiality and freedom from bias. Hence the book does not seem to have impressed the critical judgment of the country; rather it has fallen flat as an ambitious but inadequate and faulty performance.

Dr. Bagnell is manifestly concerned to belittle or call into question the monumental work of the Committee of Fifty in these premises. Thus on page 99 he says:

"The social aspects of the liquor problem could be taken up under university direction and better results obtained. At the present time there is much talk about the saloon being the poor man's club, and about the social need the saloon is filling. The investigation made of this phase of the subject has been very limited and necessarily very superficial. The most extensive work was done under direction of the Committee of Fifty, and that was very unsatisfactory, but even that was over ten years ago."

Here speaks unmistakably the President of the Anti-Saloon League! Dr. Bagnell's animus is not far to seek. The saloon was specially and thoroughly investigated by this same Committee of Fifty, headed by such men as Hon. Seth Low, President Eliot of Harvard, Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Bishop Potter of New York, Hon. Charles J. Bonaparte, Prof. Francis J. Peabody, Dr. Felix Adler, Mr. F. H. Wines, Hon. James C. Carter, Prof. R. H. Chittenden of Yale, Bishop Conaty, and others of equal eminence. The practical work of investigation was performed by the most efficient experts in the country and the report itself occupies a considerable portion of the volume entitled "Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem," and the whole of the volume labeled "Substitutes for the Saloon." In this latter work it is frankly stated:

"Latterly men have begun to inquire whether, after all, current views have consigned the saloon to its proper place in our social economy. If the saloon be but a destroying force in the community, how could it thus long have escaped destruction? Since the saloon remains, is it not probable that it ministers to deeprooted wants of men which so far no other agency supplies?"

Speaking of the saloons in the Jewish quarter of New York City, south of East Houston street and east of the Bowery, the Committee says: "Here then we find saloon keepers and saloon patrons of

a most obstemious race, thrifty often to penuriousness, among whom drunkards are exceedingly rare. Yet they drink and the saloon is to them an important institution."

Of the saloons in the Italian quarter the Committee says: "Drinking to the point of intoxication is the exception in these saloons, for the Italians are a temperate people. To them the saloon means, in the first instance, social opportunity unpurchasable elsewhere for any price within their reach, and without which their lives would be a dreary waste. Drink, though inseparable from the saloon, does not appear to be indulged in by a majority for drink's sake, but as a means to greater sociality and an unavoidable tribute for the privileges of the place."

As to the German saloons the Committee remarks: "The characteristics of the ordinary German beer shops, such as abound in the typically German districts, are so generally known that little need be said about them. One observes in them a large consumption of beer and various foods, little visible intoxication and an air of heartiness (Gemuthlichkeit) all the German's own. It is expected that the patron will take his ease here, every convenience being afforded for that purpose, and other means than drinking are at hand to pass the idle hour.

"In the degree that beer to the German is a necessity of life, in the same degree the saloon stands for beer-drinking, but not for a place of inebriation. If it were but this, would the selfrespecting German workman take his wife and other female members there? A craving for Geselligkeit (sociability) is probably more developed among the Germans than among any other people. The saloon provides the only place in which it can be obtained for a nominal price by thousands of sober and thrifty Germans.

"The tavern instinct of our Saxon forefathers is the chief impulse, aside from the drink itself, which draws their hosts within the saloons that line our streets. This instinct must be reckoned

with."

The Committee devoted a special volume to the subject "Substitutes for the Saloon." It concedes that the saloon is "the poor man's club in that it offers him, with much that is undoubtedly injurious, a measure of fellowship and recreation for which he would look elsewhere in vain." It points out also that "the laboring man out of employment knows that in some saloons he is likely not only to find temporary relief but assistance in finding

work. . . .Many a man has been put on his feet by just this kind of help."

"Are there any true And it thus answers the

The Committee asks in conclusion: substitutes for the saloon in New York?" question: "We do not believe that the saloon keeper considers that he has other serious rivals than those competing with him for trade. We are mindful of the heroic work done by the settlements, churches, and missions, but it is on the whole of a preventive character, unless we except the influence of individual upon individual; and institutions to assume the peculiar functions of the saloons are not provided."

Even Dr. Bagnell is constrained to admit that "there are many kind-hearted men engaged in the liquor business; that they do many charitable things; that the saloon does attempt to fill a certain social need of the community. This social need is a real need and very little is being done to meet it. To be sure the saloon is making an asset of this need and using it to advance its own interests, but nevertheless it is meeting it in its own way more generally than is any other agency."

Indeed it may be said of Dr. Bagnell's overweighted and prejudiced treatise as a whole, that his admissions quite nullify the force of his argument. Although he insists, and candidly enough, that alcoholism causes a great deal of poverty, he does not attempt to say, as so many of his co-partisans do, that it is the cause of fully three-fourths of the public poverty and distress. And he allows that "trained workers have discovered that no case of poverty is a simple matter, and do not assume as formerly, that liquor is the cause of the poverty, if it so happens that the man himself, or in the case of women and children, the supporter of the family, drinks. The problems of poverty can not be studied from the standpoint of any one reform and any safe results be reached. They constitute a very vital and pressing field of their own, and must be studied without any preconceived notions of their relation to any other problem."

Dr. Bagnell is perhaps weakest in his attempt to charge upon drink a large percentage of the crimes of society, although even here he is less drastic than might have been expected of the President of the Anti-Saloon League. But he ignores the notorious fact that nothing is more common than for criminals to charge their misdoings upon drink with a view to obtaining sympathy for them