394 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Aiis, and Letters. 



A greater prosperity accom^^anied with higlier wages always 

 permits a more extensive satisfaction of the desire for intoxi- 

 cating liquors, providing saloons are near enough to make that 

 desire easily satisfied. A recent rise in the prosperity of Sweden 

 must certainly be accounted one of the causes for the present in- 

 crease in drunkenness in that nation, i^rnst Iludrie, the 

 present manager of the Gothenburg samlag, says: ''With the 

 recent rise in prosperity have come higher wages, and with 

 higher wages a great increase in the consumption of liquor ])v 

 the lalx)ring' classes." Ainother factor frequently referred to 

 in various reports is the dispersion among the people of a vast 

 amount of sensual literature. How far such literature may have 

 any influence must be, however, entirely a matter of conjecture. 

 But a third factor vrhich has also been suggested, — and in my 

 opinion this is of more weight than the second, — is the fact that 

 Scandinavia is becoming more and more a center of attraction 

 for tourists. Tourists in lar<i'e numbers often make Gothen- 

 burg, Stockholm, Upsala and other cities their summer resorts. 

 The liquor consumed by them, however, is, in the general sta- 

 tistical reports, counted as if it v/ere consumed by the native in- 

 habitants, thus making the per capita consumption somewhat 

 greater than the amount really consumed by the average inhabit- 

 ant of the land. But still after making reasonable allowances for 

 these factors there evidently remains a large margin of the in- 

 crease unaccounted for, an increase which speaks plainly of a 

 greater inebriety on the part of the Swedish people. Whether, 

 however, there is on this account any reason for condemning the 

 Gothenburg system vrill, I trust, become more evident after we 

 have considered Sweden's sister state, i^Torway. 



I^ORWAY. 



There are special reasons why Norway's liquor problem is at 

 this time both laore interesting and more significant than that 

 of Sweden. It is right in I^'orwlay, and just in these years, that 

 the Gothenburg system and the liquor problem of the ^orth is 

 really being tested. How and under what conditions, — that is 

 the problem we must seek to investigate. 



