order, no vice, no crime, no poverty; nothing for the criminal courts to do; no police; three banks, with more than $1,000,000 of deposits.

Fargo, North Dakota-Population about 12,000; six years under prohibition; $1,500,000 worth of buildings erected in that time; not a vacant dwelling or business house; twenty-two miles of paved streets; water works owned by the city and paying 8 per cent; tax 25 per cent less than when saloons were permitted.

Topeka, in prohibition Kansas, and Lincoln, in high-license Nebraska, the former with 26,000 population, the latter with 45,000; Topeka with no saloons, no saloon revenue, property valuation $32,500,000, tax rate for city purposes only 56 cents per $100, expended in paving, of which it has twenty-eight miles, $216,202, bonded indebtedness $66,378; Lincoln, with saloons and saloon revenue, property valuation $30,000,000, tax rate 66 cents per $100, expended in paving but $47,408 for a street length of but twentytwo and one-half miles, bonded debt over $1,169,000.

Similar figures can be furnished from hundreds of localities. Money, to be made, requires producers of it; to be made and kept, requires care and sobriety in the production; to be made and kept or wisely spent, requires proper environment and sober conditions for the producers. The liquor traffic makes impossible or heavily discounts these required conditions. It turns producers into consumers, for whom other producers must pay. It furnishes no producers itself. Not a liquor seller makes a dollar by selling liquor; he only takes it from somebody by whom it was made. Not a brewer or distiller is a producer. Brewer, distiller, barkeeper— each is but a tax-gatherer, a tribute-taker, taking that which he has not earned, giving nothing of positive value in return.

If any town were to assess each laborer and producer in it 10 per cent of his daily earnings and income and compel payment every day, with nothing to show for this when the day's end came, there would be speedy revolution. Yet liquor thus levies daily tax upon the laborer and producer and to a far greater extent as a rule. Every saloon, every bar, taxes at least forty workingmen on an average more than 10 per cent of their earnings with absolutely no compensating equivalent. Prohibition stops this tax.

Prohibition reduces other taxes which are just, which must be paid for the maintenance of government, but which can be reduced

and yet insure better government. The larger the property valuation which manhood produces, the less the tax rate per thousand. The less liquor, the less unfitness to produce, the more production, the more value, the less tax.

Several Ohio towns lately testified as to their tax rate under prohibition as compared with their rate under license, and the evidence all ran one way. East Liverpool, after but one year's trial, and after losing the revenue from fifty-two saloons, lowered its tax rate one mill and three-tenths. Washington Court House lost all the revenue from eighteen saloons, and in three years its tax rate lessened one and one-half mills. Newcomerstown, in three years, after closing its twelve saloons, needed to levy four and a half mills less than under license. Barnesville, after six years of prohibition, found its tax rate three mills and a quarter less.

Excessive per capita taxation comes of too little per capita production or too much per capita immorality and crime. Courts and murders, crime and its punishment, vice and its fruits, cost more than all forms of legitimate and necessary government. Morals may mean all the difference between production and consumption-between the producer who pays taxes and the consumer who compels them. The saloon may mean, does mean, for a great number of men, all the difference between morals and immorality, between productive virtue and unproductive vice.

"The liquor business does not stand on the same footing with other occupations," declared Theodore Roosevelt, when police commissioner of New York. "It always tends to produce criminality in the population at large," he continued, "and lawbreaking among the saloon-keepers themselves." Criminality and lawbreaking are not evidences of morality. Where they exist productive power is discounted and the producers are taxed to sustain and punish the criminals and the lawbreakers. Productive power, which is at the basis of all sound economics, must build asylums and poorhouses, prisons and penitentiaries and jails; the liquor traffic fills them, as to from 50 to 85 per cent of their inmates, and then taxes productive power for their support.

Three years ago, in a daily newspaper without sympathy for prohibition, appeared a dispatch from Carbondale, Illinois, which was headed, "A Moral County," and which ran thus: "Its jail tenantless, with not a criminal case on the court docket, and not a

saloon within its limits, Edwards County may well lay claim to the moral banner of this country. Withal, it is one of the most prosperous counties of Illinois." About the same time the clerk of the Circuit Court of Edwards County testified of it as follows: "There has not been a licensed saloon in this county for over thirtyfive years. During that time our jail has not averaged one occupant. This county has sent but one person to the penitentiary, and that man was sent up for killing his wife, while drunk on whisky obtained from a licensed saloon in an adjoining county."

In the last twenty-five years only, outside this moral county of Edwards, which has had no saloons, and inside the bounds of this republic, which has about 250,000 of them, the number of murders has increased proportionately four and a half times as rapidly as population, and the per capita increase in the consumption of liquors has been about twofold. Will thoughtful men deny any relation of one fact to the other?

Mrs. Barney, of Rhode Island, has told of visiting one prison where there were 1,100 convicts, of whom, according to the warden's testimony, 85 per cent came there through drink. Many other wardens have testified in similar fashion.

Mrs. M. J. Annable, of Brooklyn, vouches for the record of one woman reared under saloon influences and in the atmosphere of drink, and led down by these to the lowest immoralities, who died at fifty-one years of age, but whose descendants have been traced for seventy-five years (from 1827 to 1902), to the number of 800, of whom 700 have been criminals, convicted each at least once; 342 drunkards, acknowledged so beyond question; 127 immoral women, and thirty-seven murderers, executed for their crimes; and, according to Mrs. Annable, through this one woman and her progeny the saloon and its immoral allies and their criminal tendencies have cost the producers of this nation at least $3,000,000.

"The worth of civilization is the worth of the man at its center," declared President Roosevelt, in a speech which he made in Maine, where possibly his thought was impressed by the state's prohibition policy. To insure value in man we build schools, at once the fruit and the stimulus of productive power; we hire teachers to serve in them; we pay taxes to support them; we fly the Stars and Stripes above them, in token that here we are developing and maintaining, in the citizenship that is to be, those mental

and moral qualities out of which producers and patriotism are molded and productive patriots are made.

Having done all that we do for "the worth of the man at the center," for his development in value as the unit of national wealth. it is not economic wisdom, it is not even plain commercial common sense, to maintain a system of license for an evil which contributes no element of worth to his physique, his productive power, or his patriotic life, but which robs him of the money he has earned or might earn, cripples the manhood in him which it is the duty and the imperative need of government to develop and protect, corrupts the morals which in a republic are the essential foundation of citizenship, and must be perpetuated, at a cost the nation cannot afford to pay, under any other policy than absolute, nation-wide prohibition.

"I will make a man more precious than fine gold," was the Divine estimate of human values. The only wise economic solution. of the liquor problem will come when and to the degree that human. estimates approximate the Divine.

EXCEPTIONS

IN A PROHIBITION LAW-PROBLEMS
OF ENFORCEMENT

BY HONORABLE CHARLES A. POLLOCK, LL.D.,

Judge of the Third Judicial District of the State of North Dakota, Fargo, N. D.

When the people of North Dakota, in 1889, adopted their constitution, the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor as a beverage were forever prohibited. The legislature during its first session, passed what is commonly known as the Prohibitory Law, which, among other things, provided a procedure for securing proper enforcement—the constitution itself not being self-executing. The first section of the prohibitory law embodies, in substance, the language of the constitution against the sale as a beverage, and adds the following:

Provided, That registered pharmacists under the law of this state may sell intoxicating liquors for medicinal, mechanical, scientific, and wine for sacramental purposes, as hereinbefore provided.

This permission to sell for "excepted purposes" was a recognition by the legislature that the evils coming from the sale of intoxicating liquors did not arise where the use was for medicinal, mechanical, scientific or sacramental purposes. It is of the sale for the "excepted purpose" that I am asked to write.

There can be found those who would not have any dealings in intoxicating liquors whatsoever; others believe them to have their proper and necessary use in the arts, sciences, and for medicinal purposes. Not a few, also, conscientiously believe that a fermented wine is necessary for sacramental purposes. A distinct recognition of the right of the people to determine this question of the use of liquors for non-beverage purposes induced the legislature to add the proviso clause. The legislature was here confronted with a very delicate question as to the method of conducting sales for the excepted purposes. Experience in dealing with the liquor traffic has taught legislators that evasions of law will constantly occur, nowhere possibly more than among those engaged in selling liquor for beverage purposes. Being conscious