PROHIBITION IN AMERICA 463 



laudanum and cocaine. 1 The police turn aside from an impossible 

 task. Successful evasion of one important law tends to produce 

 contempt for all law. Widespread demoralization follows. Crying 

 evils exist unredressed ; politics become merely a struggle between 

 prohibitionists and their opponents. Politicians, seeking place, 

 support one side or the other regardless of their private opinions 

 and practices. These statements are very sweeping, but they are 

 supported by any amount of evidence. 2 



759. Other things equal, large towns tend to be more in- 

 temperate than smaller towns, and floating populations than fixed 

 populations. In 1898, the latest year for which statistics are 

 available, the inhabitants of New York numbered 3,500,000, of 

 Chicago 1,850,000, of Boston 582,463, and of Portland, the capital 

 of Maine and the classic prohibition city, 41,508. Eighty per cent, 

 of the population of Portland were native-born. The convictions 

 for drunkenness per 1000 inhabitants were in New York 13, in 

 Chicago 23, in Boston 45, in Portland 42. New York, Chicago 

 and Boston permit the sale of drink ; but Boston is a * safety-valve ' 

 in the midst of a prohibition area from which came 44 per cent, of 

 the inebriates convicted in its courts. Nor was drunkenness con- 

 fined to it. Cambridge, one of its suburbs, is the largest prohibi- 

 tion city in the States ; since it adopted ' no license ' it has doubled 

 its own convictions per thousand of population. When prohibition 

 was first introduced into Portland, the convictions for drunkenness 

 averaged 16 per iooo. 3 General Neal Dow, to whom more than to 

 any other one man its establishment was due, stated in his evidence 



1 " On August 3ist, 1899 a week prior to our visit another ' raid ' was made 

 on a few of the saloons (including one bottling factory), and more than a thousand 

 gallons of beer, wine and spirits, were seized, of which nearly one-half (47 5 

 gallons) was seized at one establishment a so-called ' drug-store ' with a large 

 bar in the rear of the shop. This raid, however, like its predecessors, had to be 

 made over the heads of the city and county officials " (The Temperance Problem, 

 p. 195). "In the regular drug-stores, and in 160 of the 172 general stores in the 

 State of Vermont (then under prohibition), they sell every month 3,300,000 doses 

 of opium, besides what they dispense in patent medicines, and besides what the 

 doctors dispense (90 per. cent of the doctors dispense their own medicines), which 

 gives one and a half doses of opium to every man and woman in the State of 

 Vermont above the age of twenty-one years every day in the year. (By dose I 

 mean i grain of opium, | of a grain of morphia, ounce of paragoric, and 20 drops 

 of laudanum). And the amount consumed would average a dose to every man, 

 woman, and child in the State of Vermont every day in the year" (Dr Ashbel 

 P. Grinnell). 



2 Readers desiring fuller evidence than I have space for will find it set forth in, 

 amongst other works, The Temperance Problem, and the Reports of the American 

 Committee of Fifty to Investigate the Liquor Problem. 



3 The Temperance Problem, p. 701. 



