s, can do more harm
than alcohol and tobacco, because they breed a physique that craves
stimulants and drugs. Adenoids and defective vision will injure a
larger proportion of the afflicted than will alcohol and tobacco,
because they earlier and more certainly substitute discouragement for
hope, handicap for equal chance. Failure to enforce health laws is a
more serious menace to health and morals than drunkenness or tobacco
cancer.

If it is true that we must attack the problem of alcohol from the
standpoint of its social and industrial effects, we are forced at once
to consider the machinery by which cities and governments control the
manufacture and sale of alcohol. It is not an exaggeration to say that
courses in regulating the traffic in alcohol are more necessary than
courses in the effects of alcohol upon digestion and respiration.

If Sunday closing of saloons, local option, high license, and
prohibition have failed, there is no evidence that the failure is due
to the principles underlying any one of these methods. Until more
earnest effort is made to study the effects of these methods, the
results of their enforcement and the causes of their nonenforcement, no
one is justified in declaring that either policy is successful or
unsuccessful. It is very easy to select from the meager facts now
available convincing proofs both that prohibition does not prohibit and
that high license leads to increased drunkenness. The consequence is
that the movements to control, restrict, or prohibit the use of alcohol
are emotional, not rational.

It is impossible to keep emotion, sensation, sentiment, at white heat.
Most extremists worship legislation and do not try to keep interest
alive by telling every week or every month new facts about the week or
the month before. No new fuel is added to the anti-saloon fire, which
gradually cools and dies down. Not so, however, with those who make
money by the sale of intoxicants. The greater the opposition, the more
brains, the more effort, the more money they put into overcoming or
circumventing that opposition. Fuel is piled on and the bonfire is fed
freely. Every day the anti-restriction bonfire becomes larger and
larger, and the anti-saloon bonfire becomes smaller and smaller. By
carefully selecting their facts, by counting the number of arrests for
drunkenness and the number of saloons open on Sunday, by reiteration of
their story the pro-saloonists gradually win recruits from the