Although the Eighteenth Amendment is now five years old, the gathering of prohibition scandals for the newspapers is still a profession. I talked with its leading practitioner in Chicago, who, on one point, was curiously uninformedthe price of Scotch. The price of Bourbon he knew-$5 to $9 a quart-but the price of Scotch he had never looked into, as he got his free, from the Volstead agents. However, there is little Scotch in Chicago. Nine tenths of the whisky sold there is "B 39" grain alcohol redistilled or "recovered" by freezing. With 2 per cent. ethyl diatholate, a caramel coloring, a little bead oil, and a counterfeit neck band and stamp, it becomes genuine pre-war stuff," highly welcome in Roosevelt Road. The Chicago beer is Volstead beer, "shot" with Belgian alcohol, or with alcohol and ether, or with sheer ether.

"honest enforcement." He said: "The Volstead agents go in pairs. If one agent refuses to 'take' (that's the agent's term for accepting a bribe), he spoils the other man's game. Or they go in fours. If one refuses to 'take,' he is then spoiling three men's game. Consequently an honest agent is soon double-crossed by the dishonest ones and loses his job. Putting the force under Civil Service won't accomplish anything. There's too much easy dough.'

Then, by way of pointing out how much money there is in the liquor traffic in Chicago, he told me of an ignorant boy from Back-of-the-Yards, who became a hi-jacker two years ago and is now worth $250,000, while his four brothers are still slaughtering hogs. "Out in a quiet suburb, he has built his mother a $25,000 house and there are ten acres of ground around it," said the reporter, adding, facetiously, "Now do you mean to tell me prohibition hasn't done any good?"

At prohibition headquarters I found the usual situation-able, conscientious chiefs in command of agents who, what

ever their virtues may be, are remarkable for scarcity. As its allotment of agents under the Federal appropriation, the entire State of Illinois gets sixty-seven.

Before I left Chicago, Mr. Clarence S. Darrow called my attention to an article of his in the American Mercury for August, 1924. There he deals with the future of prohibition thus:

By whatever means it was done, and however slight may have been the understanding of the people, the fact is that prohibition is entrenched to-day in the fundamental law of the nation, and, what is more important, that there are many men and powerful organizations who feel it their duty to enforce it. The impossibility of its complete repeal has only slowly dawned upon the American people. Even to modify the Volstead Act would re

quire a political revolution, to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment is well-nigh inconceivable. But does this mean that it will remain in force forever? Does it mean that millions of people who have no sense of wrong in making, selling, or using intoxicating liquors will be subject for all time to drastic penalties?

growth and change of law has ever held that so long as a statute is on the books it should be enforced. All such students know that it is an idle statement, made by men who are ignorant of history or who are excessively eager to enforce some particular law.

After citing the laws which directed the Inquisition in Europe and the laws providing penalties for witchcraft in America, Mr. Darrow says:

All our codes are filled with obsolete laws. The Fugitive Slave Law was never obeyed in the North. The Sunday laws to-day in many states forbid the publication of newspapers. the running of trains and street cars, riding and driving for pleasure, attending moving picture shows, playing any game, the starting out of boats on voyages, or the doing of any work except work of necessity. Nearly all these laws are dead.

After the Civil War the Constitution was amended to provide equality between whites and blacks. Congress and most of the Northern states thereupon passed explicit legislation forbidding any discrimination between the races in public places, such as hotels, theaters, railroad trains, street cars, restaurants, and the like. But these laws, as every

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one knows, are now openly ignored. All sorts of gambling is forbidden by the statutes of the various states. This includes betting and playing cards for money or prizes, it includes raffles even at church fairs. Yet most Americans gamble in some way or other-and are not prosecuted.

The way to get rid of a bad law, which means a law obnoxious to large masses of people, is not by trying to keep it alive, but by letting it die a natural death. This is the way that society has always followed in dealing with unjust laws.

IN THE CITY OF KEOKUK

I

different names and buys at several different places. I don't care for whisky, myself. I make wine at home; I'm making some now out of black figs."

Dr. G. Walter Barr, physician, author of numerous scientific monographs, and long-time resident of Keokuk, thinks that it was absurd to write a police regulation into the organic law of the United States, but, now that the Amendment is there, he supports it, convinced of its good results. He said to me, "Before prohibition, I used to stay in my office every Saturday night because of surgical fifteen saloons. Now

of prohibition in Iowa, where Volsteadism has supplanted the Mulct. Twenty-five years ago I had heard the Iowans speak well of the Mulct, which provided (1) local option, (2) a minimum license of $1,000 in wet towns, (3) in moist towns as high a license as the community might choose to exact, and (4) nine o'clock closing. Thus, each town had the liquor law that local sentiment would sustain; it could be bone-dry if it liked, allow a saloon or two if it liked, allow a few more if it liked; but the compulsory high license prevented the saloons from becoming numerous, and the nine o'clock closing prevented their doing their worst. Before the Mulct, Iowa had tried state prohibition and pronounced it a failure.

Keokuk is a river town close to wicked Illinois, but wherever you go you find some special reason, loudly insisted upon by the inhabitants, if conditions are not ideal. In Keokuk there is at least no large foreign population, and the total population is barely 16,000.

At Police Headquarters, the Chief said: "The Mulct was obeyed. To-day there are no saloons, but White Mule is made in dwelling houses and sold at from a dollar to two dollars a pint, while additional White Mule comes in boats from Illinois. We caught fourteen violators last month." A business man said: "Right in this very street, every block has a place where they sell White Mule, and there is a large sale of whisky in drug stores, where the same man uses several

violations of the prohibition law; stills are made by soldering tops on milk cans and using a gasoline pipe from a Ford for a 'worm'; but a six months' jail sentence is sometimes very effective, and you don't repeal the tariff law because of smuggling."

Then, speaking of the drinking among young people, he said: "I don't attribute it to prohibition, I attribute it to 'flapperism,' and that was a war product. If we had had saloons, there would have been girls drinking at the bar, with their feet on the brass rail." Speaking of the increase in drug addiction, he said: "Prohibition has nothing whatever to do with it. The drinking man deprived of his drink doesn't crave narcotics. Physicians. agree as to that."

NO SALOONS IN FARM BELT

N MY way from Keokuk to Kansas

City, I observed prohibition from a car window. Thus seen, it is impressive. We passed through a series of small Missouri towns, every one of which had saloons near the railway stations in the old days. To-day the traveler cannot detect even a "soft drink parlor," and on the train he hears about prohibition from people who live in those towns.

A farmer said, "I come from a community of seven hundred, a few miles north of Brookfield. We had two saloons. Both are gone, and the whole community has changed." He named old topers who are now respected citizens.

"Once in a while a bootlegger comes up from Brookfield, but he doesn't sell enough to warrant a second visit." In short, the Volstead Act is obeyed as consistently in the little town of seven hundred as any law is obeyed anywhere.

However, not all that I heard in the train was gratifying. A professional ball player told of putting up at a hotel in just such a Missouri town and of being awakened by a loud rapping at his door late at night-the town marshal wanting to sell him White Mule.

of them the barkeep explained the method of turning Volstead beer into high-powered beer by "shooting" it with grain alcohol. Also, Kansas City has drugstores. Hundreds of new drugstores have opened in Missouri since prohibition. Enriched by the traffic in whisky at seventy-five cents a drink, they are able to cut prices on other commodities and, by so doing, embarrass their competitors. Last year the honest druggists financed a drive against them. As I was told by the Rev. Dr. W. S. Foreman, of the AntiSaloon League, the physicians who deal in fake prescriptions are either too young or too old to prosper legitimately.

Dr. Foreman quoted a Volstead officer who calls Kansas City one of the bestbehaved towns in the Middle West. It was the first city ever to use the padlock. During the Shriners' convention, when 80,000 strangers came to town, there were no arrests for drunkenness. During my

own stay in Kansas City I saw only two drunken men.

Discussing the great changes brought by prohibition, Dr. Foreman said, "Conductors on the late trains from Kansas to Cape Girardeau used to carry two guns each and a club and be careful not to step on the drunks. Now all they have to do is to take the tickets."

Yet, as regards prohibition enforcement in general he is anything but satisfied. Indeed, he said, "Both political parties are corrupt, and I sometimes wonder where all this is going to end. No republic has ever lasted very long. Republics are not ruled by men, they are ruled by laws, and when a republic ceases to respect its own laws there comes a smash. That is how republic after republic has broken down." In conclusion he said, “Why don't you writers ever go back into the little country towns where prohibition is a success?"

Accordingly, I crossed the river and asked Mr. Noye, of the Kansas City Kansan, to suggest a typical small town in dry Kansas; for, having read the "Victory Message to the World," by William Allen White, Victor Murdock, Henry J. Allen, and other Kansas notables, I had no doubt that prohibition would be found triumphant in a typical small town there. "Take the Interurban," said Mr. Noye, "and run up to Leavenworth."

AT LEAVENWORTH

N THE car, a business man from Pittsburg, Kansas, said, "Don't let them fool you; this is the wettest state in the Union; Pittsburg makes whisky by the carload." Another business man from Abilene, Kansas, said, "Before national prohibition there were no bootleggers in Abilene, and we never saw drunkenness. Since national prohibition, drinking among our young people has increased 75 per cent. In the old days we could always make up a pool and send a man to Kansas City for whisky. We rarely did, but knowing that we could was a relief. Now, we feel oppressed, and, naturally, we rebel."

At Leavenworth the Chief of Police

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said, "If you're looking for prohibition, here are three bottles of it that have just come in. Pull out a cork and smell." Then he opened a large closet full of captured White Mule-by his estimate, a hundred gallons. Next, he opened a great cupboard containing five hundred bottles more, each representing a separate violation. After that, he showed me six big copper stills. One had burned gasoline, another had burned kerosene. "The "The rascals go out in the woods and dig a ditch," he explained. "Down in that ditch, with no smoke curling up, they are hard to find."

Several Kansans from out of townpolice officials, some of them-were visit ing the chief that morning. A man from Atchison said, "There isn't a tenth of I per cent. of the drinking in Atchison that there was fifteen years ago." The chief replied, "I know Kansas from end to end, and you can't find a town of 2,000 anywhere that hasn't got whisky." dissented.

WHY TAKE TO DRUGS?

No one

T LUNCHEON, a citizen of Leaven

A worth spoke of the extreme rarity

of drunkenness in the street, and, after emphasizing the good effect of prohibition on business, suggested that I talk with Mr. W. I. Biddle, warden of the United States Penitentiary on the edge of the town.

The penitentiary is bone dry-a lifer told me so-but this is not because it contains a swarm of Volstead agents. The swarm, though enthusiastically described by townsfolk, dwindled on investigation to three or perhaps two. The warden was not sure which. However, the prison population is bigger than ever. Since prohibition all prison populations have increased. Without connecting it with prohibition-being a Federal officer, he could not discuss a Federal law-the warden stated the fact.

Inasmuch as a thousand of the convicts at Leavenworth had been sent there for peddling drugs, I assumed that Mr. Biddle was in a position to understand the relation between the drink problem and

the drug problem. When I asked his opinion he said, "There is no relation whatever," and so said a United States Marshal, who asked, "Why should a dipsomaniac take to drugs when it is so much easier to buy whisky?"

The marshal had come to Leavenworth from Denver on the rarest of grim errands

the errand, namely, of bringing to the penitentiary a priest convicted of forging permits to withdraw liquor. "All the way east he wore his clerical collar," said the marshal, "but I couldn't let him go in with that on, so I got him a layman's collar and a four-in-hand tie in the town."

Concerning prohibition in Colorado, the marshal said, "In Denver the other day we seized and burned $6,500 of grain alcohol that had come through from New York, and not long ago we captured twelve barrels of real Scotch. It's difficult to catch moonshiners, though. They skulk in old abandoned mine shafts, and you can't find them. The driest town in Colorado and in the United States for that matter-is Colorado Springs, but you can go to Pueblo, forty miles from there, and get drowned right in Main Street."

Returning to the town, I talked with Mr. J. M. Mickey, editorial writer for the Leavenworth Times. He came to Kansas from Pennsylvania years ago in order that his children might grow up in a dry state. "Here in Leavenworth the liquor law is as well enforced as the law against banditry is in Kansas City," he said. "A few soft drink places sell whisky, but I don't know when I've seen a drunken man. Kansas will never license the sale of liquor again. The Democrats used to have a plank denouncing prohibition, but they've given that up. This particular town isn't typical-we're near the river and near an Army post and near a state prison. If you want to study a representative Kansas community, go to Atchison and get Ed Howe to show you around."

As it happened, I possessed an article in which Ed Howe tells of White Mule:

I know women who have their cooks make it. With ginger ale White Mule makes a

palatable drink, has a big kick, and many men buy it by the barrel in order to be Bigger Devils than their neighbors. At a certain country club a party was given and White Mule flowed like water. Not only the guests drank too much, but they gave it to the girls in the dining room. The music finally stopped because the musicians were made drunk by the men giving the party. And the women who drink to be devilish are otherwise good women. I know men who ask blessings at their tables and drink White Mule. And they are not tough men, they are among the very best men in their community. I know a man and his wife who were leaders in temperance work for forty years in the days of license. After prohibition was adopted I have seen them drink cocktails made of White Mule.

Another Kansan suggested Wichita as typical, but a newspaper clipping in my possession

ate neighborhood, before prohibition, there were five hundred men sleeping on the floors of saloons every night." Pointing to an aged man, he said, "That old fellow used to be hard up for a nickel all the time. Now he's got $800." Also he said, "Drunken men used to be brought to our clinic horribly injured from fighting and there were hideous accident cases reNow we sulting from drunkenness. hardly ever see such things."

told of a recent "clean-up" in Wichita by a privateer named "Chump" Gobens, who was reported to have received $2,000 and a bonus of $500 for his services. Also, I possessed a clipping from the editorial page of the Wichita Eagle. In an account of the prevalence of reclaimed alcohol and corn whisky, it says:

These two concoctions are being sold almost openly in Wichita. Boys of high-school age can buy as readily as the old soak or the confirmed drunkard. The profits from the business are so enormous that it is no hardship on a bootlegger to fine him. Thirty days in jail does not deter him. He cannot be convicted under the persistent violator clause. So there you are.

On my return to Kansas City, Missouri, I walked through a slum and came to a fine building inscribed "Helping Hand Institute." The superintendent, Mr. E. P. Brigham, said, “Right in this immedi

soon

Outside, a drunken man was supporting himself with difficulty against the wall of the Institute. A few steps farther on I caught the odor of brewing. Then I came to a jail, entered, and said to the officer in charge, "I hear that prohibition is emptying the jails." "No, filling them," he replied.

Still further on, I

witnessed a phenomenon-street solicitation in the noon hour-and near-by was a restaurant with bar, selling cocktails, whisky, wine, and powerful "shot beer.' Women were drinking there. When I asked a waitress, "What is that big building across the street?" she said, "Oh, that's the police station."

As I reviewed the experiences narrated in this article, I thought, "Is not human ingenuity capable of finding some way to conserve the real benefits of prohibition (they are splendidly real in the little Missouri farming village of seven hundred, and in the 'flop-house' region of We. Madison Street, Chicago) without at the same time depraving a judge, a police sergeant, numerous patrolmen and Volstead agents, certain higher officials, many druggists, many physicians, a large section of the populace, and even a priest?”