p. 12 | Demonstrated Value of Prohibition

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 31, 1910

Demonstrated Value of Prohibition

It is often argued by the opponents of prohibition that in those States and communities where it has been tried, it has proved valueless, that the people have come to regard it as a yoke of bondage rather than an aid to better citizenship. Such has not been the experience of Kansas, according to the Hon. Mr. Cobern, secretary of agriculture in that State. In a recent address in Chicago he very plainly showed the excellent results attending prohibitory enactment in the Sunflower State. As given by Mr. Cobern the following are some of the benefits for which Kansas may be thankful to prohibition:—

Prohibition was never before so popular in Kansas as now, after a thirty years' trial. Its effects upon all phases of society's welfare have been helpfully wholesome, and the aforetime noisy threats of resubmission are no longer heard, even in whispers. Something of its beneficial influence upon society may be discerned in the official statistics, disclosing that at the end of the last fiscal year twenty-eight county poor-farms were without tenants; eighty-seven had no insane inmates, and fifty-four had no feeble-minded inmates. Twenty-one counties had no convicts in the penitentiary, thirty-six had no prisoners in the reformatory, fifty-two had no prisoners serving sentence in their county jails, and sixteen counties were without a prisoner serving sentence in any institution. Statistics show further that Kansas, with practically a fifth of New York's population, has less than one tenth the number of insane, and that Cook County, Illinois, furnishes more insane to the State hospitals and the institution at Dunning than the total population of all the Kansas charitable, correctional, and penal institutions combined.