[From the Cambrige Tribune, Massachusetts]

An interview with Dr. Alfred Worcester, professor of hygiene at Harvard, printed in the Harvard Crimson, speaks a convincing word for prohibition. Dr. Worcester says: "No doctor who has gone out and worked among the poorer classes could ever vote for the modification of a law against intoxicating liquors. No member of the medical profession, unless he is a specialist who has not come in contact with the life of ordinary people, could be opposed to a law like the Volstead Act which prohibits the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks." In comparing conditions in his home town under local prohibition and otherwise, he continues: "A number of years ago my own town of Waltham used to vote 'yes' one year and 'no' the next on the dry question. The general degradation of the people was so much less in the dry years that no one could fail to observe it. And it seems only logical to suppose that if prohibition were a decidedly good influence in Waltham, it would also be throughout Massachusetts and the whole of the United States."

[Hon. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Trade and Commerce, as quoted in the Pioneer, Brampton, Ontario, Canada]

There can be no doubt of the economic benefits of prohibition. Viewing the temperance question only from this angle, prohibition has proved its case. I think increased temperance over the land is responsible for a good share of the enormously increased efficiency in production, which statistics gathered by the Department of Commerce show to have followed passage of the prohibition law. Exhaustive study from many angles of production over average periods, ten years apart before and since the war, would indicate that while our productivity should have increased about 15 per cent, due to the increase in population, yet the actual increase has been from 25 to 30 per cent, indicating an increase of efficiency of somewhere from 10 to 15 per cent. There is no question, in my opinion, that prohibition is making America more productive. There can be no doubt that prohibition is putting money into the American family pocketbook. The dry law has proved its worth in dollars and cents.

[From the Boston Globe, Massachusetts]

"People often complain that prohibition is a discrimination against the poor in favor of the rich," said Prof. J. N. Carver of Harvard in a lecture before the Y. M. C. A. "It is argued that the rich can afford to pay bootleggers' prices and the poor cannot. But the question is: Whom is the discrimination against? If you think liquor is good for people, then it is against the workingman. If not, whom is it against?" Professor Carver's argument was, "Prohibition is worth enforcing." All laws worth enforcing, he said, are difficult to enforce. "If a law does not combat some bad tendency in human nature, why pass the law?" he asked. Then he began to ask more questions. "How is it that millions of dollars, paid by workingmen, have been put into investments?" "How is it that savings deposits have increased?" "How is it that people of all sorts can buy radios, automobiles?" This is true in no other country of the world, he declared. True, real wages, the average money received in proportion to the purchasing power of the dollar, have increased from twenty-eight to forty per cent since 1914, but that is not the whole story, he said. He argued that two billion dollars annually used to be spent on drink. This money has not evaporated, he said. A lot of it has gone into workingmen's savings, labor banks, automobiles, radios. We live, he continued, in an "interdependent civilization." Every one depends on every one else, in some way or other. In the old days, when people were scattered, if a man got drunk it was his own business. To-day, a business executive, a locomotive engineer, a foreman in a plant, a workman at dangerous machinery, who is under the influence of liquor, endangers other lives than his own.

[From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, California]

Wet majorities doubtless exist in some of our big cities, particularly New York and Chicago, but there is every indication that the sentiment in nearly all the smaller cities and towns in this country is overwhelmingly in favor of prohibition, and that their citizens do not desire any modification of the law that has established what they consider an acceptable state of affairs, despite all efforts on the part of unthinking people to nullify or modify that law. Strong proof of this fact is seen in the registered expression of the country editors. Most of them favor the Volstead Act as it stands, and will stand for no tinkering with it. The National Editorial Association, composed chiefly of editors and publishers of journals printed and circulated in places of small population, voted on the question of prohibition recently in this city. More than three to one were for the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act.

This remarkable preponderance of sentiment for unmodified prohibition should prove to those sincere and sober city people who have come to regard the defiance of the law in their communities as representative of the views of the people of the country at large, that there is no such general sentiment, but that the general feeling really is the antithesis of this and there is likely to be no change in it whatever. What makes this overwhelming dry vote of the editors the more important and significant is that those of them who hail from small cities and towns, as they do for the most part, are not only molders of public opinion in this, as in other respects, but they truly reflect their community sentiment, as editors generally feel bound to do if they are to make a successful newspaper. . . .

It is good to know that the country editors present such a solid front to the enemies of prohibition, that they are not only supplementing the efforts of those sober people of their communities who are working in support of the law and to prevent its nullification or modification, but that they are encouraging them in their labors, writing quotable articles for them to use in their campaigns against the wets, and assisting in making it impossible for a reactionary movement to gain headway against those who honestly believe that, as has been shown in the case of America, a dry nation is a prosperous nation.

[From an article by Chester Rowell in the Star-News, Pasadena, California]

Why was prohibition put into the Constitution, anyway, instead of into the ordinary statutes, where it could have been changed if found unsatisfactory? This is a common question. Two reasons: First: If it was to be national at all it had to go into the Constitution, at least as an enabling act, since Congress unlike the state legislatures, did not have the right to pass a prohibition law until that right was expressly conferred by the Constitution. And, second: It was put into the Constitution nationally for the same reason that it was put into the constitutions, rather than into the statutes, of most of the states which went dry. Prohibition is an undertaking which takes time. It has to be accepted as a fixed fact in law before it can be established as a fixed fact in reality. If it is an open question, to be agitated at every election, the constant theoretical agitation prevents practical progress. When a thing is put into the Constitution, it is finished. There is nothing more to agitate about. That leaves the field clear for the slower development of enforcement and acceptance.

This new agitation, based on the fiction that there is something to agitate, has temporarily nullified all this. That, indeed, is its only intelligible purpose. Those behind the agitation must know, and doubtless do know, that none of the things they pretend to agitate for can be done. But if they can fool the people into thinking it is an open question, on which Congress, if it would, could act, they can obstruct enforcement almost as effectively as if this really were the case. Under pretense of an agitation to change the law, which they know cannot be done, it is really an effort to undermine and nullify the law, which would be much worse even than changing it.

[Viscount Astor, as quoted in Great Thoughts, London, England]

The success of a democracy depends very largely upon the quality of the average voter and upon the average legislator, and any force which tends to lower this average is bad; and drink certainly tends to lower this average. I find it extremely difficult to understand exactly what we mean by some of the great terms associated with religion, such as "infinite" and "almighty," and yet it is very desirable we should. I suggest we are not helping ourselves to get a correct apprehension of the meaning of these terms if we indulge in something which just takes off the razor edge of our higher faculties. All Christian denominations agree that there is a conflict between the Spirit and the flesh; between spiritual man and carnal man; between man's higher nature and his lower nature. The effect of alcohol is entirely an appeal to the emotions associated with man's lower nature; it is an appeal to the carnal man, to the flesh.

[From a speech by Senator Borah, as quoted in the Christian Century, Chicago, Illinois]

I am one of those who believe that the Constitution of the United States is of sufficient value, if it is necessary, to trace our way through blood and fire in order to maintain it as it is. . . . What I arose to say at this time is that whether prohibition stays or goes, rises or falls, the Constitution should be maintained and supported as it is written by all law-abiding people, until it is changed in the manner pointed out in the Constitution. Obedience to the law is the rock foundation upon which our whole structure rests. To disregard it is to strike at the life of the nation. And while disrespect for law applies to all laws, statutes, and reenacted laws, there is a more sacred import to that rule of conduct when the Constitution itself is involved. It is the law of the land, the charter of our government, approved by the people, defining and guaranteeing the rights of the citizens, prescribing the duties, functions, and limitations of government; and to disregard it is to spell the end of order and representative government.

[From the Living Age, Boston, Massachusetts]

Great Britain's drink bill in 1925, in spite of unemployment and industrial depression, was more than three hundred and fifteen million pounds sterling, or approximately one and one half billion dollars. The consumption of absolute alcohol is declining, however, there having been a reduction of over forty-two per cent since before the war. Nevertheless it is estimated that the average expenditure for drink of every nonabstainer family in the United Kingdom last year was a hundred and seventy-five dollars.