nor in our intellectual leaders, who rarely are in politics; but in the petty politicians, either because they shared the opinion, or because they looked to those that shared it. Many in the end, and some in the beginning, regarded the use of alcohol as inherently evil, as a sin in itself; but more took it to be the cause of sin, and helped to thrust prohibition into the constitution in hope of thus stemming the flood of crime and violence rising through the land.

And what of all this? Adequate records are not kept, and it is with the greatest difficulty that statistics can be obtained; but, whereas in England and Wales, in the year 1921, only 85 cases of supposed murder occurred, there were in the United States in 1924, in round figures, 11,000* a thousand more than in the year preceding. Of these offenders only a hundred were executed, and for the number otherwise punished, acquitted, or never detected and apprehended, I can find no figures. Of the 85 cases in England 13 were sentenced to death, 8 declared guilty but insane, 2 ordered to be detained, 14 convicted of manslaughter, 14 acquitted, 7 found insane on remand, etc., while 22 had before apprehension committed suicide (Whitaker, 1924). For other statistics I turn to Mr. Child, and the Bar Association. Quoting Chief Magistrate McAdoo, of New York, Mr. Child says: "In London, in 1922, only 15 murders were committed; in two cases the offenders were not discovered, and one trial resulted in acquittal." In Chicago, in 1921, according to the Chicago Crime Commission, there were 225 defendants in murder cases (the murders themselves, apparently, were much more numerous). More than three-quarters paid no penalty of any kind; only 6 received the death penalty. In 1922, 62 per cent. got off; about one-third went to the penitentiary. Out of every 100 only I was executed. The Bar Association reports that during 1921 there were 260 murders in New York County; there were three convictions of murder in the first degree.†

With or without such figures at hand,‡ the public, aware that

*See New York Times, and articles on the "Crime Tide" by Mr. R. W. Child, formerly United States Ambassador to Italy, in the Saturday Evening Post, August 1, 1925.

†Report on Law Enforcement, 1923.

The statistics for crime given above are mostly from the prohibition period; but for want of others they serve the purpose, and though before that there was less crime, it was evidently abundant.

crime was of appalling frequency and apparently on the increase, clutched at prohibition as a cure. Strange remedy it seems to Europeans it is our little pill. For generations it has been preparing, in the spirit of Puritanism and asceticism and our passion for social uniformity, under the tutelage of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and of the female teachers, who teach not only the girls but the boys. With many, early impressions are strongest, and in the "temperance" teaching of our childhood, and in the edifying stories we read or plays we saw, a drink was conventionally the first fatal step. One drop of alcohol was the beginning of the end-even in the sacred cup might lurk the serpent, and grape-juice, for a generation, has replaced wine at the dissenters' communion, to whose hard heads it would still be wine. In our tender years we were sent, decently by daylight, to see "Ten Nights in a Bar-room." "Dear Father, dear Father, come home!" sings the man's daughter through the bar-room door, making public many little domestic secrets in the course of her tremolo pleadings, and it is not without provocation that he throws a bottle at her. The play is not unlike "George Barnwell," to which London apprentices used to be sent at the holidays; but George ends on the scaffold, and not drink but woman was his undoing, whilst in our play-we are a rigorous but a hopeful people-the hero reforms.

It was not, of course, "George Barnwell" that lowered the murder rate in England; nor was it "Ten Nights" that gave us prohibition. Such things are symptoms as much as causes; they affect those already inclined rather than the neutral or hostile, and by taking away the bottle the agitators and the women thought to reform the nation. They had not learned that "the function of government," as Mr. Child says, "has never been extended successfully to moulding individuals, re-making them, changing their character, or dictating conduct which does not directly affect the safety or the property of others." Neither had they learned that to be respected and of much avail a law must rest solidly upon public opinion, not upon agitation and exhortation or a regard for law as such. One thing alone they knew that rum spelt crime. Or even that simple and mistaken notion was drowned in the deep wave of passion or high tide of revival; and the word rum or alcohol, or the sight of it, sufficed. Instead, therefore, of restoring the death penalty for murder or restricting the power to pardon, expediting the judicial processes, and training up a

body of police for the profession and the better element in the public to hold office; instead, indeed, of turning their attention to the enforcement of the laws as they were, they proceeded with high and generous enthusiasm to make new laws, to create new crimes. New laws are our plague, declares the Bar Association, as cited above; in prohibition we have one that equals many. A whole category of new offences has been called into being in connection with the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor. No fewer than 68,161 arrests for violations of this law were made during 1924 by the federal officers alone, apart from those made by State officers. The federal courts are unable to keep up with the cases; the federal prisons are crowded. "Recently the Federal District Attorney for the Southern District of New York has been compelled, with the consent of the police and prohibition officers in that district, to announce that there will be no more arrests in it for petty violations of the Volstead Act."* A fleet guards our eastern and western coasts; an army watches on the northern and on the southern border; generals are borrowed from the War Office to enforce the law in the big cities; governors, sheriffs, and prohibition agents and directors meet in special conference-such is the expenditure of energy to suppress a crime that is no crime, while crime itself, too little hindered, too often pardoned stalks through the land.

In the present year the Governor of Texas, a State not notable for its law-abiding spirit, has pardoned 1,126 prisoners, including several homicides. The Governor is a woman, and is no doubt deeply imbued with the widespread sentimentality which refuses. to convict, and apparently looks upon punishment as only a corrective and not a deterrent. Meanwhile, in the West, people are voluntarily forming themselves into minute-men or rangers" to keep down robbers and bandits. Lynching may break out again as in the early days against horse thieveslawlessness to keep lawlessness in check.

It was to save the country that the agitators plunged us into prohibition, and yet they say that they are saving it. They assert that drunkenness has greatly diminished, and with drunkenness, crime. They declare that the gaols are growing empty, that some of them are already for sale, and that poverty, disease, and early

*Current History, August, 1925, p. 701. The Volstead Act is the law which enforces the amendment.

death are fast following in the wake of drink. Pamphlets and articles to this effect, written by the leaders of the Anti-Saloon League or published by them, are continually appearing, and some of them, no doubt, are now reaching the British Isles. But the Research Department of the Council of Churches is not so sure; and Mr. J. J. Britt, Chief Counsel of the Prohibition Unit, whose faith is feeble, prefers to stand on the defensive, and aver that for the increase in crime-murder, manslaughter, burglary, theftprohibition is not to blame. To be sure, it is not. Few will commit serious crimes for want of drink; but few also because they have got it.

Undoubtedly the death-rate is falling: it has been falling for years. In 1920 it was 13.06 per 1,000; in 1921, the second full year of prohibition, it fell to 11.63; rising slightly in 1922, to 11.81. But the death-rate in 1920 in England and Wales was 12.4 without prohibition; in 1923 it was 11.6. That the cause of the fall in the American death-rate for 1921 was in large measure prohibition is highly dubious; the subsidence of influenza, which had killed off most of the weakly, is more probable. Indeed, according to a great authority (Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University), by moderate drinking longevity is not reduced but, if anything, slightly enhanced.†

Undoubtedly the economic condition of the working classes is improving, and this is probably somewhat due to the new régime. The working classes, now that the saloon is gone, have not the temptation to drink that they once had, and unlike the leisured classes and the gilded youth, they are not so irritated by the restriction upon their liberty or so attracted by the expensiveness. dare-devilry, and aristocratic distinctions of the novel

*Since writing this I have come upon an article by Mr. Fabian Franklin, the distinguished mathematician, in Current History, October, 1925, entitled "Fallacies of Prohibition." I am glad to see my inferences confirmed by one who knows how to handle statistics as well as the facts of life. With larger knowledge, Mr. Franklin points out the gross misrepresentations of those who would make us think that to prohibition we owe in great measure our prosperity, our falling deathrate, or what we are far from having-an abatement in crime. He, too, compares the statistics for the death-rate and for crime in England, but he adds those for the death-rate in Australia, where, too, there is no prohibition, and shows that, though far below ours to start with, it has been reduced in the same proportion.

+The American Mercury, February, 1924.

misdemeanour. And what they drink they for the most part brew or distil themselves rather than meet the exorbitant charges of the bootlegger. But the main and only important causes of the prosperity of the working classes in America are their energy and industry, the strength of the unions both in and out of the legislature, the restriction of immigration, the high tariff, our boundless natural resources and the enormous wealth accumulated in the country during the World War. Wages have been kept up to an abnormal level. It is idle and unthinking to point-as all the prohibitionist pamphleteers do-to the working-men's bank balances and real estate, their bonds and stocks, and cry, such is prohibition! Plasterers, for instance, have been getting three to four guineas a day, and yet the cost of food, coals, and other necessities is not by any means proportionately higher than in England. The cost of food is often less, and even if employed throughout the year the plasterer would have only a trifle in income-tax to pay. Plumbers and brick-layers receive from four to six shillings an hour; engine-drivers, in 1924, earned on an average, 2,850 dollars, or £587. How, then, could they but be prosperous, whether with prohibition or without it?

The great question, however, is that of drunkenness and of crime; are they of late on the wane? Murder, we have already seen, is not, but what of the other offences? Here again statistics are faulty, but the evidence at hand is decidedly in the negative. There was, as we have seen, apparently a great improvement in 1918-1920 (though prohibition did not practically come into force until July, 1919, there were heavy restrictions before that date) but since then there has rather been a deterioration. The decreases in arrests for all causes in 1918 and 1919 are clearly owing to the decreases in arrests for drunkenness.