needed for the recent war. During
the seventeen years covered by the struggle for this amendment the
government was impotent to tax wealth; it could draft the man but not
the pocketbook. What would have been the feeling among the people if we
had entered the late war under such a handicap? How would conscription
have been received if it applied to father, husband and son and not to
wealth also?

And then, too, the Income Tax Amendment came just in time to answer the
last argument made in favour of the saloon. Those engaged in the liquor
traffic, after being defeated on all other points, massed behind the
proposition that the government needed the revenue from whiskey, beer,
and saloons. As soon as the government was able to collect an income tax
the friends of prohibition were able to look the liquor dealers in the
face and say, "Never again will an American boy be auctioned off to a
saloon for money to run the government; we now have other sources from
which to draw."

The third of the amendments was also a long time in coming and was
finally brought by joint action of Democrats and Republicans. It is not
necessary to trace the growth of this reform. Suffice it to say that
the Christian churches were the dominating force behind the prohibition
movement and that the South played a very prominent part in driving out
the saloon. More than two-thirds of the Senators and members from the
Southern States voted for the submission of National Prohibition after
nearly all the Southern States had adopted prohibition by individual
act. The first four states to ratify were Southern Democratic
States--Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina. It is only
fair, however, to say that the West contested with the South the honour
of leading in this fight, and that the Northern States finally did
nearly as well as the Southern States in the matter of ratifying. And
it is better that the victory should be a joint one, expressing the
conscience of the nation regardless of party, than that it should be
merely a party victory.

But the real credit for leadership belongs not to any party or to any
section, but to those whose consciences were quickened by the teachings
of the Bible. Total abstinence was naturally more prevalent among church
members than among those outside of the church, and this, of course, was
the foundation upon which prohibition rested. The arguments against the
use of liquor are the basis of the arguments in