THE OUTLOOK, October 10, 1928. Volume 150, Number 6, Published weekly by The Outlook Company at 120 East 16th Street, New York, N. Y. Subscription price $5.00 a year. Single copies 15 cents each. Foreign subscription to countries in the Postal Union, $6.56. Entered as second-class matter, July 21, 1893, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., and July 20, 1928, at the Post Office at Springfield, Mass., under the Act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1928, by The Outlook Company.

WITH the issue of October 24, The Outlook will take another step forward. Contained in our pages, beginning with that number, will be not only The Outlook as we know it but also The Independent-well known journal of free opinion since 1848, and long a friendly rival of this paper.

To the readers of The Outlook this means no change in editorial policy or direction. Instead, it means a larger, better magazine, a more varied editorial staff, and the addition of such well known writers as Ernest Boyd, Van Wyck Brooks, and Charles Morton to our already long and growing list. All our well known departments will be continued and several other features added. The whole enlarged magazine will be another evidence of our earnest desire to give to our readers as excellent a journal as we can a weekly to which they can turn for honest opinion and unprejudiced information.

CERTAINLY both papers inherit from founders on both sides-and from the long line of good men and true who have given their best to The Independent and The Outlook-a noble tradition and a high purpose.

AMONG the former editors of The Independent have been Henry Ward Beecher, Leonard Bacon, Edward Eggleston, and Washington Gladden. As every one knows, Henry Ward Beecher was also editor of The Outlook at one time, before the days of Lyman Abbott and Theodore Roosevelt.

THIS is an inheritance calculated to make men pause-and resolve to do their best. For many years these names were names to conjure with. Different as they were in point of view, they stood for a spirit and a purpose representative of the best America has had to offer to the world.

THE present editors of The Outlook do not delude themselves into thinking that they possess either the personality or the opinions of these men. Their determination to ascertain and present the facts, however, their effort to be of service to the liberal minds of their country-these things are part and parcel of our own endeavor.

Francis Profus Bellamy

October 10, 1928

TH

HE Eighteenth Amendment is the distinctively American move in the long game to control the consumption of alcohol. Is it a conclusive move? Are we in a position to call "check" or have we blundered, lost place and advantage? Is it a success we have achieved or a failure we have been guilty of? Are we satisfied or shocked with the result? On the answers to these questions our opinions are inevitably based, and do we not act as we think? In a democracy like ours no regulation of conduct is irrevocable merely because it has been placed in the Constitution. Public opinion which put it there can take it out again. What is public opinion going to do with Prohibition? With the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act?

On the fourteenth of March The Outlook published a questionnaire asking their readers to answer thirty-nine questions in order to discover-not facts or figures, but their opinions as to why the amendment was passed, how it is working, and what they want done about it. The replies, nearly four thousand of them, are before me now. They come from every state in the union, from all our possessions and dependencies, and from American citizens living in London, Syria, Egypt, France, Spain, Cuba, South America and Mexico. The age of the senders ranges from fourteen to ninety-seven, their occupations run the full gamut of the literate group which is sufficiently prosperous to subscribe to a magazine, sufficiently interested in public ques

now teaching Home Economics in Oregon, have been born Senorita Rosita Fernandez? May not Mr. Arnold Gould, a business man of Norwich,

Conn., have been Mr. Abram Goldman on the other side of the water? Such things have been, and names mean little. It is important to realize, however, that between 84 and 85 per cent of the replies are from men, and that the great majority of the women who answer list themselves as "house wives," "home makers," "wives and mothers."

tionnaire. Besides the four thousand questionnaires are some hundreds of letters from those who have something to say beyond the "yes" and "no" answers. Of the questionnaires exactly 3,500 are practically full answers. The first 3,000 of these to arrive have been classified by the Library Bureau. Those which came in later give approximately the same percentages. I have divided all of them by age groups, by occupation, and by locality on the theory that people's ages, what they do, and where they live, are important elements in their experience-and that their experience is the basis of what they think. One important element the answers do not give the race of those who sent them, and race has a direct bearing on what we think and do. The names are overwhelmingly English, Scotch and Scandinavian with a mere sprinkling of South European, but there is nothing conclusive about this, for may not a Mrs. Elliott McCarthy,

Outlook readers-what does it

show?

On the opposite page are the original questions with the percentages of the answers to each as they were made by people under 45 and by those 45 or over, and by men and women. The most striking thing shown is that there is a percentage of both men and women, both under and over 45, who were for the Amendment at the time of its passage, but who are not for it now.

THIS classification by age and sex

gives only the foreground of the picture. One of the most significant modifying circumstances is locality. Places have traditions and histories of their own which affect those who live in them.

But localities bounded by state lines do not mean much. States of mind have quite other limitations. They overflow the surveyors' lines and crowd across political divisions, and seep

along river bottoms and are stopped by mountain ranges and led on by the air currents that make men of a certain kind live in a certain place, and pursue certain occupations, and think in certain ways. I have picked six regions, which show six widely different conditions and experiences and may therefore be expected to induce different opinions on prohibition.

To begin with there is what is left of

old New England-Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont-relatively stable, homogeneous, rural, small town, small city folks whose ancestors have been in this country for a century or more, and who are inheritors of the tradition of the town meeting and local independence, and so certain of the wisdom of democracy that they are willing to obey the prohibition law. The

answers from this region are 83% for the retention and enforcement of the Amendment, although Maine which went dry in 1851, and since that time has enforced its own law in its own way, sends 4% of the answers against the Amendment on the ground that it is less effective than the state law and that there is an added element of corruption in the enforcement of it.

Compare old New England to the present source of our food supply, the Great Valley. I have grouped together Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, because in spite of the fact that this region contains Chicago and St. Louis and Detroit and Kansas City, busy with manufacture and trade, Tulsa with its mind centered on oil, Omaha still thinking of itself as a wild west town, and a

QUESTIONS

GROUP I-Do You Believe

whole string of river cities; in spite of hundreds of thousands of the foreign born in the industrial centers, it is still the stronghold of the American farmer By virtue of his effort we eat—also by virtue of his votes do we elect or defeat presidents. The answers from the

Great Valley are well divided and 1 believe give a fairly accurate sample of the public opinion there. Eighty one per cent of these who reply are satis fied with the Amendment as it standand against modification. There is little outcry either for light wines and beer, for any change in the Volstead Act, for a government dispensary sys tem, or for personal liberty in the mat ter of home brew. The general demand is for better enforcement and less cor ruption of officials. The Great Valley stands pat.

On across to the North West, another

homogeneous region region composed of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Over this North West, traders with their packs, land seekers and gold seekers, settlers in their covered wagons seem to have just passed. They are a small town and rural people with relatively few great cities, nordic too, with a sparse dotting of the foreign born. Since 1834 when the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay company forbade the issuance of spirituous liquors to Whites and Indians both in the old Oregon Territory, they have been experimenting witl. various forms

Most of these states made their own prohibition laws before the Amendment was passed, and enforced them as they saw fit. They ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, but they are not in sympathy with Federal enforcement. It is, judging from their letters, partly the old question of states rights, and partly a matter of rival enforcement bodies. The South is not so strong for the Amendment as either old New England or the Great Valley, they are torn between expediency and pride, but 77% of those who answered the questionnaire are content that the Amendment should stand without change.