What brought this about? For more than forty years a national political party had regularly and with facile argument offered prohibition to us at the polls, and we would have none of it. Not a perceptible dent had it ever made in the electorate. Yet prohibition was on the verge of national adoption. If for once we can wrench our minds away from the question whether prohibition is good or bad, with which we have nothing to do here, this will seem to us one of the strangest facts in American history.

Many editorial and other learned commentators have agreed that the force at work these wonders to perform is to be found in the marvelous organization and audacious methods of the Anti-Saloon League. On examination, the Anti-Saloon League does not appear to be more marvelous or more audacious than a thousand other like associations that have never compassed the like magic. The task was to move the legislators in thirtysix States to vote for a measure that traversed human experience and customs and involved an enactment few of the legislators believed in and still fewer had any purpose to obey. It was a thing harder to conceive than an ale-less Great Britain or a wineless France, and nothing in the AntiSaloon League seemed likelier to cope with its terms in 1918 than in 1900. Even when we admit the power that lay in the average legislator's fear to be called a "rummy" and all that, the residue is all illogical. Why this sudden easy sweep to victory of an idea before deemed impossible?

It is true enough that some of the States had experimented with statewide prohibition, and might therefore be thought in a mood to extend its

blessings across the continent. Southern States had taken it on rather than deal more intelligently with their race problem; certain Northern States had it for reasons that will be apparent as we proceed with these annals. But such sporadic instances could not explain the national overturning.

Evidently, back of these manifestations was at work another power, great, rather subtle, not well defined, working wisely, silently, and irresistibly. What this power was might have been surmised by anybody that noted the part in the movement for national prohibition taken by the largest and most astute employing interests of America. The fact was well known then and came afterward to be widely published that this interest had financed and inspired the campaign for the amendment that other agencies had managed. What in some quarters is equally well known, but has never been published, is that within a few years this same interest has abolished the red-light district in every American city. If this will not open our eyes, we must be blind indeed.

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The bitter crisis that came upon Great Britain and menaced her life when the World War was six months old was born chiefly of her lack of all things with which nations fight on land. Continental countries had ample stores of munitions and ample machinery to make more. Great Britain had neither. In the appalling emergency that followed, while commanders on the front begged and implored for shells, and there were no shells, the labor of every man that produced anything, and every minute of

that labor, became of vital importance. Not only of the men that produced shells or rifles, but of every man that produced food, clothes, shoes, coal, or what else; if he were not making shells, he might be making food to feed the shell-makers. Efficiency in production suddenly loomed upon statesmen as the substance of the whole situation. Upon it hung the nation's life. Newspapers and Parliament discussed the conditions that blocked the way to this efficiency, the time of miners between pit-mouth and vein, for instance, the regulations of unions, the need of machinery; but above every thing else and at all times stood out the national drink habit as chief enemy to topmost output. Whether statesmanship believed or disbelieved in prohibition as a principle mattered nothing; there were the facts with which the Government had to deal. Working-men whose brains were dulled with beer were inefficient producers. At a time when every second was precious to the national welfare, beer was causing the loss of time that mounted into the equivalent of months. It was largely because of beer that commanders were clamoring in vain for shells, and the western front was often silent for their lack.

Records kept at munition and other factories showed that week after week normal production was never attained before Wednesday. Everywhere the figures for Monday and Tuesday were below the mark; often twenty-two per cent. or even more on Monday, ten per cent. on Tuesday. The reason was that on Monday many workers came to their work still unsettled from their exploits of Saturday night and Sunday with the clinking cannikin; came unsettled, or did not come

at all, for the absences on that day were pestilential. Even by Tuesday many had not rebounded to their natural tension. It would be monstrous, of course, to affirm or to suggest that drunkenness was the rule or even common among British workers; but drink was common, and it was drink that worked this havoc.

The noon hour, with its pot of beer and bit of cheese, time out of mind the poor worker's luncheon, was another disaster. Everywhere the first two hours after luncheon were hours of slackened production, at a time when moments were like diamonds and there were no shells for the western front. "Drink in England is Germany's most powerful ally," said the prohibitionists, and there was no gainsaying their indictment. Experiment showed that where men could be induced to pass up the beer at noon there was no complaint about slackened production for the rest of that day.

In this crisis the skill that steered the affairs of the nation was great. Any attempt to abolish beer would be full of peril. In 1915 the working population as a whole had no great zest for the war, anyway; the loss of its beer it would have regarded as an intolerable addition to the troubles it was already bearing. Thus the Government would be raising one of those domestic issues it most wished to avoid. Without tempting this besom of destruction, it met the requirements of the case not by taking beer away from working-men, but by taking alcohol away from beer.

Even this it did without needless advertisement. It did not command the brewers to make an unintoxicating beverage; it merely limited the amount of grain they could have for brewing