The Liquor Interests Scared
By L. A. R.
ONE of the greatest signs of the progress of the prohibition movement is the genuine panic of the liquor interests at the present time. Whatever the average newspaper reader thinks of national prohibition, the liquor men themselves believe they are facing a really pressing problem. According to their own story, ruin stares them in the face. Everywhere they are sounding the alarm against the approaching fire of what they call fanaticism. Having had abundant experience in fighting the temperance workers, they certainly take at face value the claims now set forth by the reformers. Brewers' and liquor dealers' associations everywhere are collecting money for what they regard as the fight of their lives. In their publications are premonitions of approaching woe. The National Liquor Dealers' Journal, for example, last September detailed the circumstances which it described as spelling doom to the liquor interests. "The prohibition fight henceforth," that article declared, "will be nationwide, and contemplates writing into the national constitution a prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. To us there is the handwriting on the wall, and its interpretation spells doom. For this the liquor business is to blame; it seems incapable of learning any lessons of advancement or any motive but profit. To perpetuate itself, it has formed alliances with the slums that repel all conscientious citizens. It deliberately aids the most corrupt political powers. Why? — Because it has to ask immunity for its own lawlessness." The liquor interests have reason to feel thus alarmed. Last fall, nine states had state-wide prohibition. The elections since that time have exactly doubled the number. There are now eighteen states. The anti-liquor forces had been working sixty years to get the first nine prohibition states. Their labors seem to have been justified even so; but suddenly, in six months, nine more were added to the prohibition column. The first nine were Maine, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and West Virginia. Now Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and Idaho are added to the list. Other states, too, that have not gone in for state-wide prohibition, have county option on a scale that amounts almost to the same thing. In the last twenty years, thirty million votes have been cast for prohibition; and as a result, forty-six million American citizens, nearly one half our total population, are living under no-license laws. One half the American people have outlawed so cherished an institution as the rum shop. A temperance map of the United States shows the larger part of our territory white.