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North Carolina enjoys a drastic enforcement law. For a first offense the convicted maker of liquor gets six months in jail; for a second offense, a year and a day in prison. For a first offense any one convicted of possessing liquor pays a fine of $250 or spends thirty days in jail; for a second offense he goes to jail for from eight to ten months. If the second offense involves a nuisance charge, he spends a year and a day in Atlanta.

"There is a strong dry sentiment all over the state," said Mayor Walker.

Judge Wade H. Williams, City Recorder, added this interesting bit of information: "Lately the police caught a bootlegger and got his list of customers; it reads like the Social Register."

In Salisbury, North Carolina, I picked up a Greensboro paper, whose editor had significantly declined to

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Congratulating the President!

The President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 3.

The mere possession of liquor is dangerous unless it was obtained on a doctor's prescription and from a druggist authorized to sell by prescription. According to a résumé of Virginia's enforcement law. the Layman Act, "a man who has saved a quart of pre-war liquor and still cherishes it is liable to a prison term of one month and a fine of $50. He cannot pay a fine and escape. A man who gives a drink to another may be fined and sent to jail. A man drunk on the street is fined $54 if he pleads guilty. If he pleads not guilty, he is fined $96.

The Citizens' Committee of One Thousand "commends to the people. of the United States and particularly to their official representatives the attitude of the President in his conscientious obedience to the provisions of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in the hope that the example of the first citizen of our country may induce those who are now wilfully violating the prohibitory statute to accept his leadership in conduct and to endorse in practice the integrity of his fidelity to the supremacy of law."-From the resolutions presented to the President on January 8, 1925.

blue pencil this syndicated editorial by Arthur Brisbane:

Forty bootleggers have been killed by U. S. Government agents and eighteen more by

Coast Guards. In addition, hundreds have been killed in bootleggers' quarrels and in fights between bootleggers and hi-jackers that prey on bootleggers. It costs the Government more than $10,000,000 a year to carry on the, thus far, unsuccessful war against whisky. Possibly light beer, which might provide successful competition with bootleg

whisky, and would certainly yield the Government a revenue of five hundred millions a year, may eventually be tried.

The Chief of Police in Lynchburg said: "Before prohibition we used to get 150 drunks a month; now we get 45. It used to be one man's job to go to

"The worst feature of the situation in Lynchburg," a newspaper man said to me "is the drinking among young people. They don't wait for whisky to be brought down from the mountains, they go up after it in their cars over bad roads ten or fifteen miles. At a party the first thing a girl asks is, 'What have you got on your hip?""

"This is a dry town, comparatively," said another informant. "The wet Virginia towns are Norfolk and Roanoke, Norfolk being a seaport, Roanoke surrounded by mountains."

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However, moonshining is not confined to the mountains:

One of the most complete distilling plants seized in this section of the state in months was

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Negroes as Bootleggers

raided yesterday afternoon in a Chesterfield County swamp, near where that county and Amelia and Powhatan join. In addition to a 500-gallon wooden still, the raiding party captured fifty gallons of liquor, an 8-horsepower steam boiler, thirty-one 500-gallon

fermenters, fifty-two cases of empty halfgallon jars, twenty-four sacks of sugar, two of malt, and tubs, tools, and a doubler. Confiscations are valued at $6,000.

This I found in a dispatch from Richmond.

I had been in Virginia when state prohibition went into effect, and Virginians were then saying, "It will be a

ing electrical machinery discussed the decrease in industrial accidents. Prohibition leaders attribute it entirely to prohibition. "They overlook the introduction of safety devices," he said. "Emery wheels are now enclosed; punch presses are provided with screens that must be closed before the machine will operate; moving belts are enclosed with railings and heavy meshed wire. There has been great advance in these matters during the past five years."

WASHINGTON'S DESPERATE CRIMINALS

WASHINGTON my

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after five years of national prohibition, I was anxious to learn how the predictions had been fulfilled; so I visited a Negro quarter in Lynchburg, and, seeing Negroes on the porch of the Colored Elks' Home, went up and asked them. They backed away from the question with agility.

Later a policeman explained, "You were close to the center of the bootlegging district. White men used to get rich selling whisky to Negroes, but in these days the Negroes are getting rich selling whisky to white men."

Knoxville, Charlotte, and Lynchburg are relatively small cities. Knoxville has 100,000 people, Charlotte 60,000, Lynchburg 30,000. In all three cities. religious influence is strong; according to a circular issued by the Board of Commerce, Charlotte is "the greatest churchgoing city in the United States-greatest in the world next to Edinburgh." All three cities had accepted state prohibition before national prohibition came. All three have a public sentiment vigorously opposed to the saloon, and all three have banished the saloon. All three cities believe that severe punishment will suppress law-breaking, and have no hesitation in punishing law-breakers severely. In not one of the three is there a numerous foreign element-the foreign-born in Lynchburg number only seventy-five. Theoretically, then, all three should be dry. In reality, they are far from dry.

In the train for Washington, a technician who goes from place to place install

Sub-committee of the Committee on the District of Columbia and there I found the enforcement problem thus outlined:

The area of the District is approximately seventy square miles. It contains an unusually large percentage of well-paved streets and avenues. The highways leading into the District are for the most part improved. Bootleggers and rum-runners take advantage of this fact. By the use of high-power automobiles they seek to distribute their illicit wares in the District. These automobiles are frequently equipped with smoke screens and if the occupants are in danger of arrest or pursuit they run with headlong speed with utter disregard for the safety of the public until they are beyond the confines of the District or have eluded pursuit. Many of these criminals are of a desperate type. Almost all of them are heavily armed. They do not hesitate to shoot at any officer or civilian who attempts to intercept them.

In a statement by Mr. James O'Connell before a House committee, I read:

The enforcement, or the attempt at enforcement, of prohibition would be positively amusing if it were not for the danger attached to it. It is not safe for a man, woman, or child to travel the streets now for fear of being shot down by some irresponsible person who is employed to enforce prohibition. Members of Congress have been shot down on the streets. Men, women, and children are in

danger; you cannot tell from where a shot is coming or when a shot will strike you.

The enforcement of prohibition in Washington is hampered by a regulation

forbidding ordinary policemen to make arrests for violation unless those ordinary policemen are accompanied by Volstead agents. In a letter written last August, Police Commissioner James F. Oyster says of the Volstead agents:

They have failed us, not only in helping to make arrests, but, when the cases are called, these Prohibition Unit men very often fail to appear in court. Consequently, without their evidence, cases are dismissed or not pressed. This is very discouraging to us who are trying to enforce the law.

Travelers call Washington "the easiest place in America to buy liquor." Good whisky, so termed, costs $12 a quart. The supply comes chiefly from Maryland. Half the bootleggers are Negroes, and quite appalling is the stuff they enrich themselves by selling.

IN

POISONOUS WHISKY

N OBEDIENCE to a suggestion by the famous Mr. Yellowley, upon whom I had called at the Prohibition Unit Building, I visited the Prohibition laboratory. It occupies several large rooms in the top story of the Treasury Building. There Mr. William V. Linder, the chemist in charge, showed me all through the sample room. It is a museum of poisons. He took down specimens revealing a foul sediment, specimens with a greasy scum, and specimens in which vile, stringy clouds wormed up when the bottle was tipped. I saw gin that had been made from denatured alcohol containing 10 per cent. of wood alcohol. I saw whisky that had been colored with iodine. According to Mr. Linder, barely one one-hundredth of the whisky captured is an honest product.

In a Washington paper I read of the Klan once more, in a dispatch from Herrin, Illinois:

An arson squad has been destroying former bootlegging joints in Williamson County,

according to reports received at military headquarters here. Fires were reported three nights this week and five former liquor establishments went up in smoke. The places Klux Klansmen last December under Federal had been closed after raids by alleged Ku injunctions. A company of national guardsmen is on duty to maintain order.

This affair, like those already brought to my knowledge, made me curious to see what the Anti-Saloon League would reply to the saying, now commonly heard, "Scratch an Anti-Saloon Leaguer and you find a Klansman."

Close to the grounds of the Capitol, Wayne B. Wheeler, Executive Secretary and Legislative Agent of the AntiSaloon League, has his office. When I asked about the Klan, he showed me a Klan paper containing an editorial furiously attacking him for a speech he had made.

"That doesn't seem to indicate a very close alliance between us, does it?" he said. "As a matter of fact, there is no alliance whatsoever."

For days I had been trying to sum up the experiences and observations narrated in this article, and Mr. Wheeler unconsciously assisted me when he said, toward the end of our talk, "You must not judge the law by its enforcement. The law is right. Enforcement depends on local sentiment. A community that wants 100 per cent. enforcement will get 100 per cent. enforcement. A community that wants 50 per cent. enforcement will get 50 per cent enforcement. A community that wants no enforcement will get no enforcement."

In other words, my conclusion is that after five years of turmoil and dissension we have with us, not prohibition, but local option—that is, local option, not on the liquor question, as we had before the passage of the Volstead Act, but rather on the observance of law.

This series of articles on prohibition enforcement will be continued next month, when Mr. Hartt will tell of his visit to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. In May the final article, describing conditions in New York City, will appear

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ROUTE OF THE WARNER EXPEDITION FROM THE PINCHOW CAVES TO SUCHOW

Amid Western China's Bandits

in Search of

Earliest Art
Art Treasures

II. THROUGH KANSU PROVINCE
With the Harvard Expedition

BY LANGDON WARNER

Fellow of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, for Research in Asia

ROSSING the border into Kansu Province we felt ourselves at last in western China, where we had longed to be. It had been a twelvehour march with the same sense of being lifted high in the autumn air, the gulches and ravines on either side of our track cut down to reach the normal level of mankind. Here the tree-lined highway began, with its sinister memories of the punitive expedition in the 'seventies against the Mohammedans. If Mohammedan cruelty to the poor Chinese peasants had been unspeakable, that of General Tso in retaliation was unthinkable. No head was left on the shoulders of a believer in Allah and no timbers to his roof. When the expedition was over it appeared that Tso had exceeded his appropriations and he dared not ask the Emperor for more.

But finally an ingenious scheme was evolved. His Imperial Majesty was

known to favor the reforestation of the Empire. General Tso petitioned for a large sum to be used in lining the northwestern road with trees as an everlasting monument to his master's reign and a boon to the country people and to the few travelers. The money was granted and, though the trees were duly set out, the gallant general kept back enough money to retire comfortably on the surplus and live as a victorious commander should. The big willows and poplars which line the road, set close together, are a fine sight from any hilltop in a month's straight journeying, as they snake away up hill and down dale and across the long flats between the mountains. But the ruined towns are not so pleasant a sight -walled cities half a mile square, with a dozen huts left shouldering each other into one corner, and the sheep, in charge of an almost naked lad, nibbling over the ruins of the rest. For weeks we saw many

more deserted houses than inhabited ones, and it was not good for our spirits.

But the entrance into Kansu Province brought us luck. The very next day, less than a mile outside the hamlet where we spent the night, it lay in store for us. By the west gate of the town a brook called the Jui Hsuei flows into the larger Ching and in the angle of the two a high conical hill rises. We crossed the ford just after sunrise and, looking up, saw a cave entrance above us in the rock. With little hope, after the disappointment at Pinchow, we stopped the carts and made our way up a briary path. At the doorway of the cave was the first evidence, a square stone, some two feet high, with a Buddha in the niche on each of the four faces. The carving was patently of the sixth century, earlier than what we could make out from the Pinchow sculpture, and I confess that my heart jumped. But it sank again when the cave seemed shallow and we were confronted by a figure cut in the solid rock, restored beyond my powers of imagination to fix a date. I pried about on the right-hand side but found my way blocked with burnt bricks and fallen stone. A shout from Jayne, who had gone to the left, brought me to the other side on the run. He had found a passage on his side, parallel to, the face of the cliff and almost pitch dark as we came in from the morning light. It turned abruptly into the hill, and now I knew why he shouted.

We were in a fairly well-lighted chapel where rows on rows of Buddhist figures, carved in the rock walls, looked down on us. Many were broken, it is true, but at first sight they seemed untouched by restoration. There could be no doubt that here was the evidence we wanted, Buddhist sculpture of the sixth century in its original position, and hitherto unreported. We knew of no other examples of that period on the great northwest road between Honanfu three weeks behind us and Tun Huang two months ahead to the west. A slight examination showed that there had indeed been plaster restoration at some more or less recent date but, to offset that fact, the manner

the

of the principal statue was precisely that of the very earliest-dated Buddhist sculpture in China.

Cameras and flashlights and measuring tapes were soon brought from the carts, where they stood on the river beach below, and we set to work to plan the cave and examine the carvings. The statue that faced us at the chapel entrance was on the front of a core pillar, but the way around it had been blocked on one side with debris fallen from the roof. There remained, however, more or less intact, two walls of the cave proper and the half of another wall as well as three faces of the central pillar which had not been hidden by fallen stone.

A

THE ELEPHANT CHAPEL

MONG all the rock-cut chapels of China this one proved to be unique in many ways. Jutting out from the core pillar, which had been spared from the rock from floor to roof and which lessened in girth as it rose, were the heads and shoulders of four elephants, their front feet firmly planted on the wide pillar base and little pagodas, standing free from the rock, on their backs. I tried to connect these elephants with the cult of the wise Indian god Manjusri who sits on the elephant throne in later Buddhist paintings, but could find nothing to show that the chapel had been made in his honor. And there is no close parallel in Chinese or Indian architecture that we know.

Below these great beasts, which jutted out from the corners of the pillar, were bands of figures about three feet high, cut in relief and engaged in strange occupations. Of these bands there evidently had been eight, two on either side of each angle of the pillar. But now only three of the series were completely decipherable. The southerly one on the west face may eventually shed some light on the elephants which carry the pagodas, and it gave us an additional reason for calling the place the Elephant Chapel.

But best of all the statues and the carving was the great smooth head of a Buddha, which rose serene out of several tons of fallen stone in the niche on the

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