410 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



fender. These two factors, — the first encouraging the police 

 vdih an incentive towards financial gain, the second confronting 

 him with the fear that if he shirks his duty or enters into fraud- 

 ulent agreements with saloon-keepers he will himself be visited 

 with punishment, — create (1) a competition among the police^ 

 and (2) a scrupulous attention to duty. Under these condi- 

 tions it is hardly possible that the illicit dealer or any other of- 

 fender against the liquor law can tbCape his doom. The num- 

 ber of arrests as shown in preceding tables must therefore be a 

 tolerably true criterion of the amount of illegal traffic in liquor 

 actually existing. 



Our second inquiry now needs but little discussion. Mr. 

 Aiarestad, who is undoubtedly the highest authority on the liquor 

 problem of Xorway and who has thoroughly investigated the 

 material relevant to a consideration of this inquiry, says in his 

 reports, — and ^\4th him the police themselves of the various 

 cities agree, — that, in general, the conditions under which ar- 

 rests for breaches of the liquor law have taken place have re- 

 mained practically unaltered during the last few years. In 

 speaking of the arrests for illicit liquor selling, he says: "There 

 is no reason for believing that the police have not been just as 

 ingenious and careful in arresting illicit dealers since the dis- 

 continuance of the samlags as they were before." 



It being established then that even in the cities where sam- 

 laiTS have been discontinued drunkenness continues, and that 

 the cause of this drunkenness cannot be attributed to illegiti- 

 mate liquor selling, we next have to inquire whether these 

 cities patronize neighboring samlags. It does of course seem 

 natural that just as soon as samlags were discontinued in a city 

 some of the inhabitants of that city, especially those who voted 

 for a continuance of the samlags, would buy spirituous drinks 

 from the samlags still operating in neighboring cities. The 

 only way by which we can find out whether this is w^hat has 

 actually happened, is to ascertain whether or not the records 

 of the neighboring samlags show much greater sales after the 

 discontinuance of samlags in other places than before such dis- 

 continuance. The following tables are designed to give the 

 necessary information by showing the last year's sales by the 



