Oakland’s Proposed Saloon Ordinance
The authorities in the city of Oakland, California, are discussing an ordinance that will limit the number of saloons, and restaurants that are allowed to serve liquors, to 200, and they will raise the license from $500 to $1,000 a year. It is estimated that the city has approximately 40,000 males over twenty-one years of age, and who are legally entitled to buy drinks. A large proportion of these will not care to buy at all. It will be seen that there must be many women who are addicted to the drink habit, and a great many minors allowed to buy drinks, in order for such an army of saloons to be supported in a city of 200,000 inhabitants. Population is centering more and more in the large cities, and here the great drink evil is strongly entrenched, and how to drive it out is one of the great problems of this time.