limit to
the problems which ought to be studied most seriously before such a
gigantic revolution is organized. The physician may ask whether and
when alcohol is real medicine, and the physiologist may study whether
it is a food and whether it is rightly taken as helpful to nutrition;
but this is not our problem. The theologians may quarrel as to whether
the Bible praises the wine or condemns the drinker, whether Christ
really turned water into that which we call wine, and whether
Christianity as such stands for abstinence. It is matter for the
economist to ask what will become of the hundred thousands of men who
are working to-day in the breweries and related industries. A labor
union claims that "over half a million men would be thrown out of
employment by general prohibition, who, with their families, would
make an army of a million human beings robbed of their means of
existence." And the economist, again, may consider what it might mean
to take out the license taxes from the city budgets and the hundreds
of millions of internal revenue from the budget of the whole country.
It is claimed that the brewers, maltsters, and distillers pay out for
natural and manufactured products, for labor, transportation, etc.,
seven hundred million dollars annually; that their aggregate
investments foot up to more than three thousand millions; and that
their taxes contribute three hundred and fifty millions every year to
the public treasuries. Can the country afford to ruin an industry of
such magnitude? Such weighty problems cannot be solved in the Carrie
Nation style: yet they are not ours here.

_The Lonely Drinker of the Temperance Town_

Nearer to our psychological interest comes the well-known war-cry,
"Prohibition does not prohibit." It is too late in the day to need to
prove it by statistics: every one knows it. No one has traveled in
prohibition States who has not seen the sickening sight of drunkards
of the worst order. The drug-stores are turned into very remunerative
bars, and through hidden channels whiskey and gin flood the community.
The figures of the United States Commissioner of Internal Revenue tell
the story publicly. In a license State like Massachusetts, there
exists one retail liquor dealer for every 525 of population; in a
prohibition State like Kansas, one for every 366. But the secret story
is much more alarming. What is the effect? As far as the health of the
nation and its mental training in self-contr