"Crime, Booze, and Taxes"
By A. C. Gilbert
A Striking Illustration — Hard Facts
That Tell Their Own Story MUCH is said about conserving the natural resources of the country. The greatest conservation that can be accomplished is the saving of human lives from physical and moral degeneracy; and the next is the protection of the monetary income to the benefit of the producer, turning it into legitimate channels of trade. Any power or influence that turns the earnings of toilers into avenues of profligate waste must be considered a debaucher of humanity, an abettor of crime, and a breeder of vice and misery. Such is the liquor traffic. THE TAXPAYER, THE POLICE, AND THE DRINKER
The province of Saskatchewan, Canada, is waging a vigorous warfare called "Banish the Bar Campaign." The campaign organ, Banish the Bar Crusader, contains a pertinent article that sets forth the relation of the liquor traffic to economics. It is headed, "Crime, Booze, and Taxes," and reads as follows: "The report of the police department of the city of Regina for 1913 has just been made public, and shows a strange state of affairs. "The taxpayers of that city pay $57,000 annually to maintain their police force, and in the year 1913 there were apprehended or summoned by the force 2,583 offenders. "Of these offenders, no less than 1,850 were in trouble as a direct result of the liquor traffic, which the good people of that city623voted to retain in the 1910 local option contest. . . . "These figures mean that somewhere between seventy per cent and seventy-five per cent of the cases in the Regina police court are due to the existence in that city of the liquor traffic. THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND THROWN AWAY
"The police force, as above stated, costs the city $57,000 yearly. The liquor traffic pays licenses to the amount of $3,200 into the city coffers, leaving $53,800 to be raised elsewhere. An amount about equal to the licenses is levied on the unfortunates who are arrested or summoned; and the balance, over $50,000, comes from the rate payers. At least seventy per cent of this $50,000 is directly due to the liquor traffic, or approximately $35,000. And the force must be increased at once, so the chief constable says. "What a kind, gentle, long-suffering lot of rate payers those rate payers in Regina must be! "Surely it is high time, from an economic standpoint, that these crime-breeding, tax-levying, vice-spawning holes should be plugged up." Let us, by our votes, our voices, our pens, help to sweep this infernal traffic from our doors and ultimately from our land.