THE SUCCESS OF PROHIBITION IN KANSAS1

BY GOVERNOR E. W. HOCH.

A constitutional amendment was adopted in this state in 1880 prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in this state except for medicinal, mechanical and scientific purposes. The battle for the supremacy of this law has been continuous since then. The liquor interests have contended against it in every possible way, but the law has constantly grown in favor and is now about as well enforced as any other penal statute.

I may say in general that it has been a great benefit to the state morally, educationally and financially. I question whether there are a similar number of people anywhere on earth relatively more prosperous than are the people of Kansas. We have more than $100 per capita in our banks; nearly one-third of our counties are without paupers in their poor-houses or prisoners in their jails. We have the only state capital in the Union absolutely without a saloon. We have more than a quarter of a million young men and young women over twenty-one years of age who never saw a saloon. In short, we have a higher and better civilization than can be found in any state where the saloon is tolerated. One-half of our counties sent no prisoner to the penitentiary last year, and more than one-half of the prisoners in our penitentiary never lived in Kansas long enough to gain a residence in this state.

These may seem extravagant words, but I believe them to be literally true. The devil never invented a bigger lie than that the saloon is essential to the financial success of any community. We have proceeded for more than a quarter of a century in this state along two fundamental lines: First, that the logical attitude of government toward a recognized evil is that of prohibition, and that the liquor traffic is a recognized evil, we have contended, is attested by every license law, high or low, and has been affirmed and confirmed by the courts, from the lowest to the highest. We have insisted that if the liquor traffic is good it should be as free

'This statement concerning the accomplishments of prohibition in Kansas was made in a letter from Governor Hoch to the Editor of THE ANNALS.

as the grocery business or the blacksmith business, but that if it is bad no department of government should be in partnership with it. Secondly, we have contended that a business which decreases the earning capacity of a large number, at least, of its patrons, cannot, in the nature of things, be a good thing financially for a community. The nation is rapidly adopting these fundamental views of ours. Prohibition states and subdivisions of them now cover more than half the territory of the United States, and prohibition governs more than half the people, and our business views of the subject have become even more popular than our moral views of it. The business world is now a great temperance society. No railroad company wants a drinking employee; no merchant a drinking clerk; no one interested in a bank cares to have a drinking official, and the saloonkeeper himself would not ride comfortably on a railroad train if he knew that the engineer had a bottle of his liquor in his pocket. We confidently expect the Kansas idea to become universal.

PROHIBITION AS A PRESENT POLITICAL PLATFORM

BY W. G. CALDERWOOD,

Secretary, Executive Committee of the Prohibition National Committee, and Secretary of State Prohibition Committee of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.

Any question to be of such importance as to be made the basis of a political platform must measure up to four tests. (1) It must concern the purpose of the government-the life, liberty and happiness of the people, the establishment of justice, the general welfare, the common defense, the blessings of liberty, or some similar governmental purpose; (2) it must be of such magnitude as to be of real importance; (3) it must be unsettled; (4) it must be capable of settlement.

Questions measuring to but one or two of these tests may properly be in a platform, but may not properly be its basis. The center beam of a real political platform will be found to always measure up fully to the four tests. Take a living and hence dangerous illustration-the tariff. It has been the center plank of more political platforms than all other questions in American politics. Around it have been waged the battles of the past with valor and zeal. Platform builders have laid it as the main stay of their structures, and the level and plummet have trued every other plank to it, but not a platform architect would now dare to line to it, and both of the parties which have been accustomed to forget all else would now gladly forget it.

The reason that the formerly great platform timber has become a cumbrance in the political lumber yard is not hard to find. It concerns to no small degree the purposes of government. Check I. It is of sufficient magnitude to challenge commercial attention. Check 2. It is unsettled. Check 3. But it cannot be settled. It fails at 4.

We have tried to settle it, but failed. Our fathers tried, but failed. Their fathers tried, but failed. Were commercial conditions (with which tariff deals) static, a shrewd mathematical statesman could settle the question, and an intelligent political party could

adopt his settlement as the basis of a platform, and, when in power, enact the settlement into the law-books and then look for new worlds to conquer. But commercial conditions change, hence the tariff fails to measure to the fourth requisite, and it is an administrative and not a political problem.

Take a dead illustration-the slavery question. Apply the measure of every test to it, and it bulks full-it concerned the life, liberty, and happiness of the people. Check 1. Check 1. It was of mighty commercial, political and social import. Check 2. It was unsettled. Check 3. It was capable of settlement. Check 4. All of which leads to the general observation that most commercial questions are not true political questions because based upon principles which change with changing commercial conditions; hence, commercial questions, rarely merit other than subordinate positions in political platforms. Per contra, moral questions which measure to the tests for platform timber, being based on the changeless principles of moral rectitude should and by the voice of history do form the basis of platforms in the real political contests. And no intelligent reader will be long misled by the prominence of candidates, frequency or noise of brass bands, or other ocular or auricular evidences as to the real issues of a campaign. A political issue is vital. The campaign torch-light procession is not. A "wake" makes a mighty demonstration, but its basis is a corpse. So with many a campaign.

Prohibition is the only present issue that measures to the four tests of basic platform material. It is vitally and inseparably related to the fundamental purposes of government. No issue, present or past, has so concerned the God-given rights of life, liberty and happiness, to insure which governments are established among men.

As to life, in its coarse, corporeal, material sense the liquor traffic out-butchers Gettysburg every six weeks. As to life in its somewhat elevated sense-comfort, contentment, hope, cheer; the contrast broadens by ten diameters. As to life in its best sense, moral, spiritual, vital, life; a hundred Gettysburgs could not work devastation so damnable as a single night of debauchery. There were 4,000,000 blacks who bore the relatively gentle bondage of bodily slavery. There are probably not less than two and a half times as many who are under the unspeakable inward bondage of habit. That which is imposed upon a man from the outside is

nothing. Death, the Leveler, will come soon at longest and whether good or bad will free him of it. That which is of the life, not merely on the life, is beyond the touch of Death. So when Lincoln compared the slavery of drink to the slavery of shackles he rightly said:

Herein shall we have a viler slavery manumitted, greater tyrant deposed; in it more of want supplied, more of disease healed, more sorrow assuaged. By it no orphans starving, no widows weeping.

And happiness-no time need be wasted to show how this sweet purpose of government is turned to gall and wormwood and ashes by drink. Therefore, prohibition, as a present political issue, does vitally concern the basic principles of government. Check 1. It is a mighty problem, mightest in the sense shown in the preceding paragraph. Yet, financially, commercially, economically (all bearing the $) it over-tops the most colossal of problems. Financially it represents a direct and indirect annual outlay of more than the total national debt at the close of the war. The direct and indirect cost of alcoholic liquor for twelve months would lay a pavement of silver dollars twelve inches wide and reaching from Hell Gate, N. Y., to the Golden Gate, in San Francisco. With the money we could buy our annual product of wheat, potatoes, barley, rye, gold, silver and precious stones, and have enough residue to pay all of the dividends of all of the railroads, on all of the stock of the national banks, and the entire expense of our public school system and the pensions of old soldiers. And economically that money is worse than wasted. "No," says some one. "It makes an outlet for barley and hops and corn." But the man who would buy brick and mortar and labor to build a dam to flood and destroy a city would worse than waste the money paid for the material and labor though he would make an outlet for brick and mortar, and employ a horde of toilers. Commercially it is a dead weight. It destroys ambition and ability, and that destroys productivity, and without productivity there is no healthy commercein the last analysis, no commerce. I eschew argument to illustrate. On the banks of the Red River of the North are ten cities, five in prohibition North Dakota, and five in license Minnesota. Towns thrive on commerce and die without it. Every prohibition city gained more population during the ten years of the last census than