time, for instance drink. It is not enough to look at the condition of the person concerned at the present moment. It is necessary to know the life of the family and its fortunes in the past. Here as elsewhere it is a question where to draw the line in defining drunkenness. The commission started a special investigation to find out to what extent alcohol may be regarded as a cause of drunkenness. The official statistics it found to be less reliable and to yield too low totals. While its own statistics are not regarded as in every respect final, the results are nevertheless significant and are stated as follows:

The statistical investigation made included all persons who had received public poor relief during the year 1910. It was found that drink was a chief cause in 4.8, a contributory cause in 1.8, drunkenness in earlier days in 2 per cent, a total of 8.6 per cent. The corresponding numbers for the rural districts were 1.2, 0.8 and 2.5, a total of 4.5 per cent.

The returns from the country districts were held to be particularly reliable. Here it was ascertained that in 44 per cent of the poor districts of the country there was not a single case in which drink at the present time or previously had been a cause of destitution, and in 1910 in all these districts there was no case of actual misuse or cases due to drink in the past. There remained 38 per cent of these districts in which the poor relief authorities found cases requiring assistance on account of drink in the past.

A special effort was made by the commission to ascertain the probable number of intemperate persons in Norway. In 1859 an investigator came to the result that of unmarried men and widowers 9.1 per cent in the municipalities and 3.1 per cent in the rural districts were to be regarded as intemperate. If these figures be applied to the population generally, including all men over 20 years of age, the result would have shown 5.7 per cent of such men to have been intemperate. A member of the alcohol commission has attempted a new calculation utilizing mortality returns for 1911. On the basis of the proportion of alcoholics among the persons having died within the year, he seeks to establish the relation among those living, and of course presupposes a greater mortality among alcoholics than in the general population. The general result arrived at shows for the whole country 2.5 per cent of men over 20 years

of age to be alcoholic. The conditions naturally appear better in the country districts than in the cities. The commission remarks that there has been a notable reduction in alcoholism. The difference is really larger than it appears on the surface as the opinion as to what constitutes an intemperate person is more rigid now than in 1859. It may be remarked that this improvement no doubt is due in considerable measure to the legislation governing the sale of alcoholic beverages. This also seems substantiated by numerous reports obtained from different public authorities.

DIFFICULTIES WITH PROHIBITION IN RUSSIA

(Reprinted from the Literary Digest, July 10, 1915.)

The wave of temperance which swept Russia at the beginning of the war, after the Czar's ukase forbidding the sale of spirituous liquors, is rapidly receding. Deprived of the vodka, to which they were so strongly addicted, the Russian people, we are told by some outspoken organs of the press of that country, are consuming various poisonous substitutes, the secret manufacture and sale of which are assuming considerable proportions throughout the Empire. Cases of poisoning caused by these drinks are a daily occurrence. Writing in the Russki Vratch (Petrograd), Dr. Novoselski gives interesting figures showing the growth of mortality due to alcoholism in Petrograd. According to his official data, there were 26 cases of death. from delirium tremens in the period from August 17 to September 13, 1914; 33 cases from September 14 to October 11; 34 from October 12 to November 8; 43 from November 9 to December 6; 53 from December 7 to January 3, 1915; 58 from January 4 to January 31, and 66 from February 1 to February 28. Commenting upon these figures, Dr. Novoselski writes:

"Before prohibition the mortality figures varied and changed without definite regularity; after prohibition they show a regular and constant increase. The prohibition measures were becoming stricter and stricter; at first the sale of vodka was forbidden everywhere but at the first-class restaurants; then the prohibition was extended also to those restaurants, but with the permission to sell beer and wine; and lastly there followed a general and complete inhibition of the free traffic in any and all alcoholic drinks in general. And the mortality from alcoholism increased as those measures progressed. . . .

"The constant rise of the mortality figures, which bears testimony to the growing number of consumers of different substitutes for vodka, shows that these are used not only by confirmed drunk

ards, but generally by those classes who before the prohibition law used to drink moderately. . . . From the report of the Obukhow Hospital at Petrograd, it can be seen that among the victims of alcoholism who entered the hospital were persons of all ages (mainly twenty to thirty years of age) and all occupations."

In Russia's western provinces, according to "R. G." in the Ryetch, prohibition does not seem to be very popular. He says:

"The sun of sobriety has set before it reached the zenith. The first two months drunkenness was really not noticeable. In the villages the fact that the law came into force at the busy season contributed largely toward abstinence from drink. In the cities isolated cases of the use of poisonous imitations of alcoholic beverages ended so deplorably that there was a fair prospect of getting rid of incurable drunkards. But here the field-work came to an end, the organism had partly adapted itself to the harmful imitations, partly adapted them to itself, and 'life entered upon its normal course.' The village folk had hardly had time to wear out the boots in which they marched after the coffin of 'the monopoly' when tens of thousands of illicit liquor distilleries, factories of all kinds of strong drinks, came into existence. It must be said that the fight against the producers of such drinks is being waged energetically. Since the issuance of the circular offering a reward for the discovery of secret traffic in liquor the excise officials and rural authorities have vigorously prosecuted the task. According to official data for the latter part of 1914 there were discovered in Vilna government alone 58 illicit liquor distilleries, while for the preceding year there had been discovered 14 such places. But in the place of those suppressed new ones spring into existence, and, besides, the manufacture of alcoholic beverages is being practised in private dwellings.

"It is now ten months . . . since the sale of liquor was discontinued. . . . After such a considerable time the stoppage of the traffic in liquor takes on a permanent character, and a return to the former order becomes less and less possible. However, it would be naïve and ruinous to regard the work of reform as completed. On the contrary, this task is now all ahead, there is much of it and the work is urgent. The stoppage of the sale of liquor has undoubtedly made a revolution in the psychology of the masses.

Vodka played a great part in our peasant life, and its disappearance creates a greater or less vacancy which in some way or other must be filled. It is therefore not surprising that the further it is from the beginning of the war the more often there appear reports about secret liquor distilleries, the spread of various imitations, dangerous not only for health, but for life itself. There also come reports that the village folk are becoming addicted to gambling, and that a passion for it is seizing the whole mass of peasantry. In short, everything points to the fact that the sobering of the people cannot be accomplished by the simple discontinuance of the traffic in liquor."