[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sra,—Your American correspondent, " A. P. S.," who writes in defence of Prohibition would have been more convincing if he had given the name of the town of 200,000 population in which he lives, and inwhich, he says, the number of drunken men seen could be counted on the fingers of both hands. But he studiously refrains from giving any data to support his statement. The World League Against Alcoholism has pub- lished statistics of 300 cities in the States with a total popula- tion of 33,000,000 which show that arrests for drunkenness since 1920, when national Prohibition came into operation, have increased from 244,737 to 515,996 in 1923, and the North American Review bases on these figures an estimate that the arrests throughout the country have risen from 892,585 in 1919 to 1,377,885 in 1922, and estimates the annual con- sumption of liquor at 260,965,272 gallons, or twice as much as before• Prohibition. Between 1920 and 1923 deaths from alcoholism rose from one per 100,000 of the population to 3.2, an increase of 220 per cent. It is evident, therefore, that the working man's prosperity is due not to the fact that he is drinking less, but to a number of causes, the first and foremost of which perhaps is the immigration restriction law, which has reduced the floating supply of common labour, and has materially, if not entirely, solved the problem of unemployment. Mechanics are getting from 12 to 15 dollars a day and common labour 6 to 7 dollars, and the margin between the increased cost of living and the increase in wages is 35 per cent. in favour of the worker. Motor cars cost 29 per cent. less than before the War, and the terms are generally one-third cash and the balance payable in instalments, and the development of instalment buying is recognized as a growing evil which may have very serious consequences.
The increase in savings deposits is largely due to the huge Government advertising and propaganda campaign to " sell "
thrift to the people, and the scramble of the Banks to induce savings business, but the increase in deposits from 1920 to 1923 was only 785,000,000 dollars, roughly £157,000,000, not so much as was invested in this country in War Savings certificates alone, and represented during a period of unexam- pled prosperity an increase of three per cent., whereas the increase for the period 1910-18 was eleven per cent. And Mr..1. M. Gibbons, Attorney of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company, writes that the greatest increase in saving bank deposits, home building investments and auto- mobile purchases have been in the wettest States where prohibitive liquor legislation is badly enforced or not enforced at all, rather than in the so-called dry States, where the law is said to be enforced to the alleged satisfaction of the Anti-
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