THE STATE DISPENSARIES OF SOUTH CAROLINA....... SUPPRESSION OF THE "RAINES LAW HOTELS"......... Rev. John P. Peters, D.D., Chairman of the Committee of J. K. Codding, President Kansas State Temperance Union, PROHIBITION AS A PRESENT POLITICAL PLATFORM W. G. Calderwood, Secretary Executive Committee of the Pro- 69 75 86 97 106 Mrs. Edith Smith Davis, Director and Superintendent of the CONDUCTED BY CHESTER LLOYD JONES Notes, pp. 146-161. REVIEWS DAVENPORT-Value and Distribution (p. 161)... HENDRICK-The Power to Regulate Corporations and Commerce (p. 162).. .S. Nearing .E. R. Johnson HOLMES-Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Cæsar (p. 163)..... HUNTER-Socialists at Work (p. 164).. LEWIS-The Stanneries-A Study of the English Tin Miner (p. 164)..... .C. Kelsey .S. Nearing ...R. V. Phelan MCCORMICK-The Tragedy of Russia in Pacific Asia, 2 vols. (p. 166)..... SMITH Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony, 2 vols. (p. 167)..... .C. Kelsey ..C. W. Alvord SNEDDEN and ALLEN-School Reports and School Efficiency (p. 168). SOCIALISM, the Case Against (p. 169). STIMSON-Federal and State Constitutions (p. 169)... SWIFT-Mind in the Making (p. 170)...... ..C. A. Herrick .I. Cross .C. L. Jones ..C. A. Ellwood WEBB, S. and B.-English and Local Government, 2 vols. (p. 171)..... J. W. Garner LIST OF CONTINENTAL AGENTS FRANCE: L. Larose, Rue Soufflot 22, Paris. GERMANY: Mayer & Müller, 2 Prince Louis Ferdinandstrasse, Berlin, N. W. ITALY: Direcione del Giornale degli Economisti, via Monte Savello, Palazzo Orsini, Rome. SPAIN: Libreria Nacional y Extranjera de E. Dossat, antes, E. Capdeville, 9 Plaza de Santa Ana, Madrid. Copyright, 1908, by the American Academy of Political and Social Science THE LOCAL-OPTION MOVEMENT BY S. E. NICHOLSON, Harrisburg, Pa.; Superintendent, Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League; Secretary, Anti-Saloon League of America. The temperance movement has been forming in America for a century. Having its genesis in a protest against excessive drunkenness, it passed by successive stages first to a plea for only moderate indulgence, then to a protest against inebriety in any stage, culminating later in a nation-wide demand for a universal standard of total abstinence. Here the first obstacle was met in the movement for temperance reform. Gradually there came the consciousness that the drunkard was only the product of the drunkard maker. The reformer came to see the incongruity of trying to maintain the saloon as a place of public resort, and at the same time trying to enforce the principles of total abstinence. At once there began the movement, which has now grown nation-wide in its operations, to remedy the evils of drinking, by striking at its source in the public saloon. As a problem in social ethics, the futility of reforming the drunkard and preserving others from the drinking habit was clearly seen, so long as the public saloon was allowed to educate the people along contrary lines. Therein lay the foundation of the present-day local-option movement in the United States. At first every form of regulation merging into restriction was experimented upon. License, low, medium and high, has been tried in every conceivable form. The restraining hand of the law has been laid heavily upon the traffic at almost every point. It has been hedged about, until the liquor business stands plainly in a class by itself, controlled and restricted. as is no other business interest in America to-day. Yet has the blight of the traffic continued to fall upon our people, until the home, the church, and the electorate have each alike felt the deadly sting. of its touch. Little wonder then that a conviction began to seize the American mind that a business that could not be controlled and would not be regulated could only be destroyed. Little wonder then that the public conscience, outraged by the excesses of the traffic, and driven to a desperate resolve by the continued lawlessness of the saloon, should have begun to suggest plans for the ultimate extinction of the public drink traffic. When this remedy, radical as it was, was once presented, its advocates grew to a multitude in a single decade, and when civil war rent the nation almost asunder, and for the time absorbed the public mind in other great problems, a surprisingly large number of states had determined to abolish the saloon. war. The dark days of the '60's were dark days for the temperance movement. The liquor men, chiefly the manufacturers, driven to desperation by the events preceding the culmination of the slavery agitation, seeing now the financial distress of the government at Washington, with rare foresight stepped to the front and asked that their products be taxed to meet the extraordinary expenses of the Thus in a day, by the passage of the internal-revenue laws, was a large share of public opposition mollified, and for a quarter of a century was the public conscience eased on the subject of the liquor traffic. It is said that President Lincoln, deprecating the advantage which he so readily foresaw would accrue to the liquor cause, at first refused to affix his name to the bills levying a heavy tax upon the production of liquors. Being assured, however, that they were only war-relief measures, he affixed his signature with the expectation, it is said, that the tax would be repealed with the close of the war. But when fighting had ceased Lincoln was in his grave, the war tax was perpetuated, and for twenty-five years the people seemed slow to resume a conflict with a business that was contributing so largely to the public revenues. Profiting by the absorption of public attention in the issues that grew out of the destruction of slavery and the reconstruction of the states, the liquor men, with a strategy worthy of a better cause, saw their opportunity to enter the political arena, and for forty years created and held the balance of power between parties, supporting only their friends and warring upon their enemies, while the better citizenship of every state was settling the problems of civil war. Herein lay the secret of the political power of the saloon, which has become proverbial in nearly every large city of the republic. With the passing of the years, however, and with the growing arrogance and lawlessness of the saloon, there was crystallizing again a public sentiment that demanded the destruction of the traffic in drink. Maine, the pioneer in the movement to abolish rum, survived the deluge of civil war and remained true to its first principles. Kansas, by a narrow margin, in 1880, abolished the saloon by constitutional authority, followed by North Dakota with its admission to statehood. But reverses elsewhere led to an enforced reconstruction of the methods of attack. The necessity arose for a workable plan that would meet the liquor men upon their own ground and that would seek legislation of a sort that would be enforceable by the power of a concentrated local public sentiment. Georgia this time blazed the way with a plan that accorded with the true American principle of local self-government, and more than twentyfive years ago adopted a system of local option, putting the liquor question in the hands of the voters of a given local community, to determine whether or not the saloon might continue to exist therein. The wisdom of this system, which not only harmonizes the operations of the law with existing local public sentiment but guarantees under present conditions a better and more permanent form of law enforcement, is evidenced by its persistent spread throughout the nation, until to-day every state is operating under some form of local option except the three prohibition states of Maine, Kansas and North Dakota, above mentioned, the wholly license states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, and Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Oklahoma, which have recently passed from local option to state prohibition. Coincident with the growth of the local-option movement, and the spread of no-license territory under the operations of such a statute, have been the origin and development of the Anti-Saloon League. This society has sought to organize and apply an awakened public sentiment as a force in politics and legislation that would outweigh and defeat the machinations of the organized liquor forces. Within this arena, and upon this basis, will a campaign be waged for the next decade, between the now thoroughly aroused liquor elements on the one hand and the rapidly organizing and solidifying anti-saloon forces on the other hand, a campaign to determine in its first analysis the extension of no-license territory to the farthest possible limit, but in its final result to establish the control of poli |