630 
THE AMERICA N-S CANDIN AVIAN REVIEW 
Sweden 
After an agitation which increased in violence as the decisive day 
approached, the Swedish people, on August 27 , in the first plebiscite 
ever held in the country, voted against total prohibition. As men¬ 
tioned before on this page, separate count was kept of the men and 
women voters. Generally it is taken as a foregone conclusion that the 
women of any country will be more likely than the men to favor total 
prohibition. In the present case the voters taken as a whole were 
59.09 percent against prohibition, while the women were 57-03 percent 
for it. The entire vote was 913,772 against and 878,110 for; the vote 
of the women was 341,511 against and 458,889 for. Undoubtedly the 
government will now refrain from presenting any prohibition bill to 
the Riksdag, since a measure of such far-reaching importance will 
certainly not be forced through without a large majority of the original 
voters behind it. €JIn addition to the agitation, some of it very fanat¬ 
ical, for and against prohibition, the summer in Sweden has been 
marked by two strikes which, from their nature, were very much felt 
in the daily lives of the people. A telephone strike in Stockholm and 
Goteborg for several days rendered all telephoning impossible in the 
Swedish capital which is supposed to be the city in all the world most 
addicted to the use of the telephone. It is claimed that the strike was 
declared with a very small majority of the telephone operators them¬ 
selves, and the royal telegraph department which now has control 
over all telephones in the country, was soon able to fill the places of the 
striking girls. The mediation of the government resulted in settling 
the strike without any important gain being made by either side. 
CJ Another important strike was on the private railways in the vicinity 
of Stockholm. The plan of the strikers was to extend the strike in 
wider circles, but inasmuch as most of the railwa} r s in Sweden are 
owned by the government, and these were not affected, while those 
affected were still able to keep up at least a restricted traffic, the 
stagnation was not felt very much. {JAn effort has been made, under 
bolshevik influence, to organize in a few Stockholm regiments so- 
called soldiers’ clubs patterned after the Russian soldiers’ councils. 
No dues were to be paid by the men, but the expenses were met from 
the bolshevik treasury. In many places the officers did not interfere 
with the clubs, although the military law expressly forbids organiza¬ 
tions tending to breed discontent and undermine discipline; but when 
the matter was given publicity in the press, and thus came to the 
notice of the higher authorities, the movement was nipped in the bud. 
^Unemployment, though still existing in some localities, is steadily 
on the decrease, and the authorities have therefore thought it possible 
to withdraw State aid to the unemployed and leave the matter to the 
municipalities. 
