RUSSIA'S TEMPERANCE EXPERIMENT 123 



From the mobilization of Russia's troops to their 

 defeat at Port Arthur, the contrast between a great 

 army drunk and a small army sober was presented 

 with such dramatic force that the Russo-Japanese 

 war might have been enacted as a movie with a moral. 



The Czar visualized the lesson and added to the 

 war films "the mournful pictures of popular debility, 

 household distress, and neglected business, the 

 inevitable consequences of an intemperate life" 

 revealed in a journey through his Empire in 1913, dur- 

 ing which convictions were formed which six months 

 later resulted in the famous prohibition ukase. 



In a letter to his minister of finance, the Czar 

 affirmed that the journey which will ever be memora- 

 ble in the annals of Russia was ''accomplished with 

 the help of God " and who can doubt the affirmation? 



The beginning of the war found Russia with a 

 shortage of war materials and without the industrial 

 means to provide them. The evils of vodka had 

 grown to such proportions that in one year infant 

 mortality had mounted to four and a half million; 

 the ranks of her workmen w T ere depleted by one 

 million deaths from alcoholism and the sequestra- 

 tion of eight hundred thousand criminals in jails. 

 The shortage of munitions and the lack of industrial 

 material could not be remedied at once, but the drain 

 on the nation's manhood could be stopped by a word. 



The word came and it was heard throughout the 

 world PROHIBITION ! 



And yet but a day before you would have been 

 told in Russia, as we are now told in the United 



