AMERICA AND PROHIBITION [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Dr. Grenfell's picture is surely incomplete. In Dallas, where he spoke, with population 200,000, the arrests for drunkenness in 1925 were 4,552, as compared with 3,839 ten years befOre. In the same year the total proceedings in Bolton (population 178,000) were 152, in Leicester (population 234,000) 215, in Halifax and Huddersfield (combined popula- tion 210,000) 196.
A special correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, writing last year from Kansas, said : " Stills, stills every- where. They swarm in valleys, over mountain sides and along river banks. Moonshine is dripping from the worm in areas that slept for decades under dust " ; front Minnesota : " The liquor business in Minnesota is not a mere matter of barter and trade, but a humming industry. . . The clergy and civic leaders have railed against the people's indifference to all dry regulations . . . all to no effect " ; from Colorado, that " statutory prohibition is meaningless " in town after town that he names. He refers to a poll conducted by the Denver Post " a dry organ." " Appeals were made from pulpits everywhere and ballot boxes were stationed in the churches. The votes resulted as follows : For Prohibition, 20,756 Against PrOhibition, 79,700 ; In favour of Winc and Beer,
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