creasing from 53.1 per 100,000 population in 1890 to 63.6 per 100,000 population in 1910. These are the returns set forth in The Statistical Abstract of the United States based upon United States Government investigations. Another Federal Government investigation has recently shown that the assertion that the greater part of taxes is used up in police, court, charity, correctional and similar functions is fantastic. Bulletin 126 on Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000: 1913, issued in 1914 by the United States Bureau of the Census, completely disposes of that hoary assertion by showing in a summary table covering the entire 199 cities in the United States investigated that the per capita cost of police is $2.00, and that for charities, hospitals and corrections is $1.II. In percentages, police payments are only 11.6 per cent, and charities, hospitals and corrections 6.4 per cent of the total expenditures. These figures show how small a proportion of the whole has to be spent for institutions dealing with crime, poverty and allied factors. Elsewhere in Bulletin 126 the figures for the various cities are given in detail. It is especially worthy of note that these figures show that in a number of cities such as Atlanta, Memphis and Nashville the cost of either police or charity departments or both is considerably higher than in license cities of the same population such as St. Paul, Columbus, Toledo, Dayton, Paterson, Omaha, Spokane, Fall River, Grand Rapids, Bridgeport and other cities. It is equally worthy of remark that an official leaflet issued recently by Comptroller William A. Prendergast of New York City, giving in detail the figures of how every $100 in taxes is spent, shows that only $8.25 in every $100 goes to the support of the police force (a considerable part of which, by the way, is employed in regulating street traffic). Comptroller Prendergast's leaflet further shows that only $2.70 of every one hundred dollars taxes is spent for criminal and civil courts, which added to the amount expended for the cost of the District Attorneys and their staffs for five counties, makes a total of only $3.20 for all judicial purposes. Still further, Comptroller Prendergast's leaflet states that a total of only $4.96 of every $100 taxes goes to the Department of Public Charities for charitable insti tutions, state and private, and only 68 cents of every $100 taxes for the maintenance of city prisons, penitentiaries, etc. Although the Government figures cover the expenses of municipalities and do not include those of states, they unquestionably are, making every allowance for their incompleteness in that respect, a very valuable indication of the allotment of expenditures, .and they self-evidently show the rashness of the wild exaggerations of prohibitionists that the cost of police courts, prisons and charities consumes the greater part of taxes. With this assertion disposed of, we can now enter into a review of the financial condition of affairs in many of the prohibition states. KANSAS As a State which has been under prohibitory laws for thirtyfive years, Kansas ought, according to prohibitionists' promises, to reveal a highly gratifying financial condition by this time. From the inception of their movement, the prohibitionists have fervently proclaimed that if prohibitory laws were adopted, finances, both public and private, would be vastly improved, and that this improvement would speedily show itself in the lessening of public and private debt, and specifically as far as private debt was concerned, in the practical effacement or minimizing of farm and other mortgages. It was particularly a favorite argument on the part of the prohibition advocates to arouse public opinion on the subject of farm and home mortgages. Every well-advised person knows that mortgages are the result of many interwoven causes and cannot be attributed to any one single factor, yet the prohibitionists always connected them with the drink question, as though liquor were either the principal or exclusive cause. But what do the government returns show? On the score of ' families having homes the facts are available. The 1914 Statistical Abstract of the United States sets forth that in 1910 of the total of 228,594 families having homes in Kansas, 148,141 homes were free of debt, 76,726 homes were mortgaged, and the facts as to 3,637 homes were unknown. Thus, after thirty years of prohibition, by 1910, fully one-third of the Kansas homes were mortgaged. This fact is all the more impressive when it is considered that the bulk of population in Kansas is rural; by the census of 1910, only 493,790 or 29.2 per cent of the population were urban, while 1,197,159 inhabitants were rural. In the matter of mortgages it may here be appropriately pointed out further that one of the insistent arguments used by the original prohibitionists in Maine, 70 and 80 years ago, was that mortgages on homes and farms came from drink, and that they would largely be eliminated under. prohibitory laws. Yet, after more than half a century of prohibition, Maine reveals, by the census of 1910, that 25,841 or nearly one-fifth of the total of Maine's family homes were mortgaged; Maine's population is about evenly divided between urban and rural. And in North Dakota, 89 per cent of the population of which is rural, the census of 1910 disclosed that 34,437 family homes, or considerably more than one-third of the total of 87,641 families having homes, were mortgaged. Dealing further with the sweeping assertion of the prohibitionists that prohibition unfailingly introduces greater prosperity, the facts in Dun's Review give an emphatic answer. Dun's Review sets forth the number of commercial, manufacturing and trading failures in Kansas, constituting an extremely large proportion of the whole number engaged in business, in what is predominantly an agricultural State. Not to enter into the records of previous years, we shall simply summarize more recent failures, as available in Dun's Reveiw. In 1911 there were in Kansas 365 commercial failures with liabilities of $1,584,369. In the next year there were 228 commercial failures with liabilities of $2,638,385. In 1913 the number of commercial failures was 214, with liabilities of $2,689,685. A survey of Dun's Review shows that the percentage of commercial failures as compared with the total number of business concerns has been much higher in Kansas than in many licensed states. It is needless to say that all who are not obsessed by extremist doctrinarianism know that failures are caused by a wide variety of circumstances and conditions and it is practically impossible to point to one thing as a cause. But in view of the everlasting prohibition assertions that failures, personal, moral and business, result from the saloon and drink, and that prohibition abolishes this alleged cause, these Kansas figures supply an eloquent commentary |