of the harmfulness of alcohol. It stated among other things that
vodka was a poison.

"I was so impressed with this, knowing that everybody drank vodka, that
I asked the first physician I met if the statement were true. He said
yes. Men drank it, he explained, because momentarily it gave them a
sensation of pleasant dizziness. From that time I decided to take every
opportunity to discover more about the use of vodka.

"At the end of the eighties there came famine in Russia, followed by
agrarian troubles. I saw a crowd of peasants demand from a local
landlord all the grain and foodstuffs in his granary. This puzzled me; I
could not understand how honest men were indulging in what seemed to be
highway robbery. But I noted at the time that every man who was taking
part in this incident was a drinking man, while their fellow villagers,
who were abstemious, had sufficient provisions in their own homes. Thus
it was that I observed the industrial effects of vodka drinking.

"At Samara I decided to do more than passively disapprove of vodka. At
this time I was an Alderman, and many of the tenants living in my houses
were workingmen. One night a drunken father in one of my houses killed
his wife. This incident made such a terrible impression on me that I
decided to fight vodka with all my strength.

"On the supposition that the Government was selling vodka for the
revenue, I calculated the revenue received from its consumption in
Samara. I then introduced a bill in the City Council providing that the
city give this sum of money to the imperial treasury, requesting at the
same time that the sale of vodka be prohibited. This bill passed, and
the money was appropriated. It was offered to the Government, but the
Government promptly refused it.

"It then dawned upon me that Russian bureaucracy did not want the people
to become sober, for the reason that it was easier to rule
autocratically a drunken mob than a sober people.

"This was seven years ago. Later I was elected Mayor of Samara, capital
of the Volga district, a district with over a quarter of a million
inhabitants. Subsequently I was elected to the Duma on an anti-vodka
platform. In the Duma I proposed a bill permitting the inhabitants of
any town to close the local vodka shops, and providing also that every
bottle of vodka should bear a label with the word poison. At my request
the wording of this label, in which the evils of vodka were set forth,
was done by the lat