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option, which were abandoned because liquor traders were habitual and often insolent lawbreakers and would not as a class submit to any kind of reasonable regulation.

3. Outlaw the liquor trade, thus making liquor traffickers in law what they have been for a century in fact, enemies of society; this is the real motive of prohibition.

4. Adopt Government ownership and

operation of the liquor trade; this is the Canadian system.

No intelligent man can suppose that the people of this country will assent to No. 1 or No. 2. The controversy is therefore limited to No. 3, which we are now trying, or No. 4, which the Canadians are trying. But if we want No. 4, or Government ownership and operation, for which there are some reasonable arguments, we shall have to repeal or

amend the Eighteenth Amendment. Thus it seems clear that all talk of modifying the Volstead Act is wasted breath and Senator Edge is setting up a man of straw.

In summoning the two Yale editors to Washington, however, Senator Edge has done the cause of American education a greater service than, perhaps, he surmised; for he has given college thinking as prominent a place in the newspapers as college drinking.

The American People vs. the Alien Bootlegger

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HE last Census showed that approximately 37,000,000 of our population are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. They came from countries where wine. and beer are more common than water, and, it is safe to say, are wet by inheritance and habit. In the pre-prohibition days saloon-keepers and bartenders were chiefly of this foreign-born class. The first year in which the Brooks High License Law became effective in Pennsylvania only 300 licenses were granted in the city of Pittsburgh, and 297 of the successful applicants were foreign-born. With this fact in mind, I took note as I went about the country of the names over the doors of saloons, and I found them almost universally foreign-German, Irish, Italian, Polish.

In a National referendum the Eighteenth Amendment would undoubtedly be sustained, but quite as undoubtedly the great cities would go wet by majorities equal to the excess of their foreign vote. The two principal candidates in the last municipal election in Buffalo, for example, were labeled wet and dry. The American vote, the vote of the residential wards, went to the dry candidate, but the wet candidate was elected; 150,000 Poles, 1,000,000 Germans, 60,000 Italians, and several thousands of other races, more or less newly naturalized, nullified an American law in an American city.

I have served on the jury in the Federal court when "hooch" cases were on trial, and I observed that the defendants were aliens by a very considerable majority. Russians, Greeks, and Italians were the conspicuous offenders, while the petty violators of the law who were dismissed by the judge with a reprimand and a fine were Negroes of a very low grade. In order to learn whether all the Federal courts could report the same preponderance of alien violators of the

By IMOGEN B. OAKLEY

Eighteenth Amendment, I wrote to the Department of Justice in Washington and to Mr. Haynes, Chief Commissioner of the Prohibition Bureau. I found that no records of nationality have been kept. The courts are already so congested that to inquire into the nationality of every defendant would be only to add delay to delay, and the Government has had to content itself with the mere facts of violation.

United States district attorneys in various parts of the country, however, have, in the lack of positive knowledge, made estimates of the proportion of alien offenders against the liquor laws, basing these estimates upon the names and speech of such offenders. It is reasonable to assume that if a defendant has a Russian or Italian name, and speaks Yiddish or Italian better than English, he is not a native American. Using names and speech, then, as indications of nationality, two district attorneys of the Philadelphia division have estimated that from sixty-five to seventy-five per cent of the bootleggers brought to trial are aliens. The district attorney for Delaware estimates this alien percentage as sixty per cent, and the attorney for Connecticut places it at eighty per cent. The same estimate of eighty per cent is made by the United States attorney for New Jersey. Any one may verify the reasonableness of these estimates by reading the names of the men who are reported in the daily papers as arrested for bootlegging or for complicity in "rum plots."

Placing the average percentage of foreign-born bootleggers at sixty-five per cent, a very conservative figure, as those who note the preponderance of markedly foreign names among the offenders will allow, it follows that thirty-five per cent must be Americans. At least fifteen per cent, however, must be accredited to the Afro-Americans, and thus by a process of elimination we find that twenty per cent

of the bootleggers and venders of "hooch" are probably native white Americans. In the absence of statistics concerning nationality, there is nothing to indicate what proportion of this twenty per cent is native American of colonial descent and what is merely the second or third generation from countries which give us the majority of violators of the Prohibition Law.

It is quite true that the American most desirous to defend his countrymen from the charge of lawlessness cannot deny that many of them in high places are using their influence to protect the bootlegging industry. It is only too certain that there are Congressmen and high officials who vote dry to be seen of men and act wet secretly in their own interests, and who have prevented the placing of prohibition agents under Civil Service rules in order to make the Prohibition Act the opportunity for the most flagrant practices of the spoils system. But, as Mr. Cable, of Ohio, has reminded us in his speech before the House of Representatives on "The Myth of the Melting-Pot," not a few Congressmen and high officials owe their positions to constituencies with a large foreign vote, and very nearly all of the bills favoring the restoration of light wine and beer have been sponsored by Representatives from districts where the foreign vote holds the balance of power.

The Eighteenth Amendment has come to mean much more than the regulation of the liquor trade. It is the answer to the question, Which race and which racial traditions shall control America? Shall the respect for law and order which is our best inheritance from our colonial ancestors be maintained, or shall it give way to the desires and customs of the forty-two nationalities who speak fortytwo languages in the United States and vote according to forty-two racial prejudices in American elections?

Some Kind Words for

Words for Wood Pulp

By DON C. SEITZ

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VER since the late Senator Warner Miller, of Herkimer, New York, earned the sobriquet of "Wood Pulp" Miller, some forty years ago, for his share in establishing a great industry that made it possible to produce newspapers at low cost, to the public advantage, "wood pulp" has somehow been held in contumely. Lovers of the forests groan when they see a two-pound Sunday newspaper and wonder how long the trees can last under such demands. The habit among the well-meaning, but uninformed, is to lay all blame for forest destruction upon the pulp-grinder and his close relative, the paper-maker.

Now pulp is made from a few sorts of wood only-spruce in the main, some fir and poplar. These are all fast-growing trees, and under fair conditions can be expected to reproduce in forty years. The land upon which they grow is useless for other purposes and much is so situated as to have small, if any, demand made upon it for agriculture. Therefore wood can be treated as a crop and raised at a good profit. This the pulp-makers have discovered and are trying to do.

Just now a new famine cry is being raised; this time in Canada, where a strong movement is under way to prohibit the export of pulpwood to the United States. Last year this amounted to 1,330,000 cords-a tidy industry. The plea put out for prohibiting the trade is that the timber should be kept at home for the salvation of local industry, or compel the transfer of more American capital to Canada. The Canadians sniff at the United States, but not at its dollars. A good share of the 1,388,081 tons of newsprint, valued at $100,276,903,

there produced last year was made in American-owned mills.

The stoppage of such export would, of course, work great hardships on mills operating in the States, but, as the Canadian Pulpwood Association aptly points out, the reaction would be worse on the other side of the border. It would kill a large and profitable trade for no other purpose than forcing a low price, to the benefit of the sawmill men and the local paper mills. The timber owner would be starved and the large number of men employed put out of business, while fire and rot would destroy much of the value of what is now a live asset. The lumbermen can export their output ad lib.

The Pulpwood Association points out the prime fact, which meets the prejudice the prime fact, which meets the prejudice noted at the beginning of this article, that lumbering is the most wasteful of the methods of dealing with the forests. Only about thirty-five per cent of the tree comes out salable. "Tops" twentyfive and thirty feet long, that would produce half a ton of pulp worth $15, are left to rot and feed forest fires, while slabs and edgings do the rest. In getting slabs and edgings do the rest. In getting out pulpwood, "tops" down to three inches are utilized, and in the making of ground wood pulp eighty-five per cent of the weight is returned in fiber, and sixtyfive per cent of sulphite or chemical five per cent of sulphite or chemical pulp. The manufacturers of artificial lumber from cellulose therefore give back twice as much as the Canadian sawmill man, who is the leading "patriot" in this effort to establish an embargo.

Beyond this the railroads derive double the revenue from handling pulpwood ble the revenue from handling pulpwood that they now do from sawed timber. The labor employed is equal to that used by the lumberman, while the more com

Miles of pulpwood in a Labrador river

plete utilization of the raw product means more than twice the economic return. So the query of the Canadian Pulpwood Association, "Why pick on pulpwood?" has sound reason behind it. The Association justly observes:

"Under the guise of patriotism and masquerading their clever scheme as an important measure of Forest Conservation, the shrewd and wealthy pulp and paper mill owners have secured hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of free publicity from the newspapers and periodicals of the country, whilst the pulpwood owners, engaged in a trade every whit as legitimate and worthy of encouragement as the lumber industry, for example, have had to pay advertising rates in order to even get their side of the story before the public. If the Canadian pulp and paper mills want or require the wood owned by their fellowcitizens, that is now being sold to United States mills-they can buy it. It is, and always will be, for sale in the open mar

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manufacturers of newsprint can sell it duty free in the United States. How long would they enjoy this privilege if they succeeded in arbitrarily cutting off the raw material supply, as they are trying to do? One-sided "reciprocity" is hard to maintain, even in the face of a necessity.

Meanwhile it might be stated that, despite the enormous figures of wood-pulp cordage given out, the cut for that purpose is only about three per cent of the annual denudation of forest land. The ax of the lumberman and fuel cutter take the rest.

This Teaching Business

In which a rural educator reveals why hair grows gray By KARL W. DETZER

RETIRED farmer on the school

board in a small town in Iowa took me to task the other day.

I had happened to mention that I once did publicity for a prize-fighter.

"We don't have any prize-fighting in this town," he said, thankfully. "We wouldn't allow it."

From the railroad train the town of B looks as if it were a peaceful little place. It has a population of 1,400. It ships a lot of cattle and hogs to Omaha and Chicago. It has a consolidated school, five churches, one movie, two blocks of stories, and a corn cannery. It also has a school fight.

A school fight is not a pleasant spectacle, nor is it uplifting. It is not polite. Compared with the prize ring, where iron-jawed gentlemen have decreed it foul to hit below the belt, a school fight is a brutal sport. Public opinion is a partisan referee. Most of its jabbing is done below the waist-line-the teacher's waist, usually.

In the town of B it happens to be the somewhat thin waist of my brother-inlaw, Pete, who works his eight hours, plus after school and evenings, managing the six-hundred-odd children in this consolidated school district, directing some fourteen other teachers, quelling the big boys, training for declamatory contests, running a basket-ball team, teaching manual training, bossing the bus drivers. who tote the country children into town and home again, and doing a hundred other modern educational tasks. Time left the superintendent spends with his school board.

"What's wrong with your board?" I asked, after hearing a tale of woe.

"Nothing wrong with it: it's like all the others I know," Pete told me. "There are two Methodists, one Catholic, one Lutheran, and the preacher of the Peace Evangelical church. It's the Peace preacher this time who's leading the fight."

He wanted Pete to resign, it developed. Also he wanted the scalp of the woman principal of the high school.

"Creed, in his case," Pete answered when I asked him why. "It breaks out the end of every school year. You always hear creeds when small-town school-teachers are elected."

I hadn't known that. I never taught school. Education in a small town is a very complicated business, I discovered. Presidential elections aren't in it. Three Methodists controlled the board in B town until this spring. The Peace preacher defeated one of them for reelection. Before the Methodists it had been Congregationalists; before them, Catholics.

"Half our town is retired farmer," Pete explained. "Most of them are Catholic. They controlled the school board about four years ago and appointed a Catholic superintendent. He was a good man, wide awake. It was he who started the campaign for a new schoolhouse."

"Why didn't he stay?" I wondered. I asked Pete.

"Well," Pete said, "the Lutherans simply went crazy, and so did nearly every one else. They all joined forces and put three Congregationalists on the board. Of course they fired the Catholic superintendent. But they didn't appoint the man the Methodists had picked. So it was only a case of waiting for the Methodists to control the board. Then I got my job, two years ago. I tried to play the middle ground."

Of course I laughed.

"I couldn't," Pete agreed. "I found that out. I started going to the Methodist in the morning, which is my own church. Sunday evenings I attended all the others, in rotation. Fanny [that's his wife] made pies for all the Ladies' Aid suppers. Think she's baked two hundred, actual count."

We were sitting in Pete's office. Children were passing in and out, asking

questions, presenting papers to be signed, borrowing books. A little girl came to the door; about seventh grade, she looked.

"May I go over town before next class?" she asked.

Pete frowned. Nature never meant Pete to frown. He has too friendly a face. I could see now that he wasn't too sure how to answer.

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Then he said: "No; sorry." "My father said you had to let me," the child insisted.

"I said no," Pete repeated.

She pouted. Pete closed the door and started to tell me who she was. Her father was a board member and a doctor. Just at that minute one of the teachers came in.

"Dr. Perkins is inspecting the manualtraining rooms," she reported.

Pete and I went down. We found the doctor the father of the girl who had just asked permission to go to town during school hours. He was an ordinary small-town physician, a good doctor no doubt, who always voted, always went to church.

"Bessie says you would not let her run over town," he began.

"Sorry," said Pete. "It's against the rules for any one to go to town during school hours."

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"Look here!" Dr. Perkins put on his eye-glasses. "I'm on your board. won't have my children refused!" "Against the rules," said Pete once more, very calmly.

"Then change the rules," retorted Dr. Perkins. "I'll tend to it, next meeting." He stormed out of the room.

"You see," Pete explained, "I got in bad with him by calling Dr. Burns when young Pete had whooping-cough. I never guessed Perkins would be elected to the board. He's been mad ever since. Tells his children he'll bring me to time. now that he's on the school board. They tell the other children, and I hear it.”

We had walked over into the new addition to the school building. Plasterers were busy on the auditorium. It was a fine, big room, airy, light, substantial.

"Splendid!" I told Pete. "I bet the town is proud of this."

"Some of the people are," he admitted. "But there's another pinch. I knew that we needed this auditorium, not only for the school, but for town meetings as well. Everything now has to be held in an old fire-trap they call the opera house-every public meeting that doesn't properly belong in the churches. So I came out flatfooted for a school auditorium.

"It stirred up trouble at once, although we got the auditorium. The fellow who owns the opera house has five brothers here in town and more cousins than you can count. I tell you, he fought! Stirred out his whole family. He makes five dollars a night renting his hall. Once we get a free meeting-place, there'll be less business. So he got his father-in-law on the school board. His father-in-law's the Lutheran. The retired farmers got behind him, some of them, because they didn't want to put up any more school

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tax. They called it a fight against addi-
tional taxes; but behind that was a fight
to make five dollars a meeting for the
owner of the opera house."

All these things Pete told me, and
many others. He explained that the
principal of the school had invited some
neighbors in for tea at her own home one
afternoon, and that certain women were
not invited. No snub had been intended.
But a battalion of deeply injured and
extremely vocal citizens were demanding
now that the principal be turned out into
the cold because she was not democratic.
She wouldn't be re-elected.

No one mentioned her ability to teach. One crowd howled to have both principal and superintendent removed, others fought to retain them. They walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, campaigning. They discussed everything in the world except the moral character of the man and woman involved and their ability as educators.

"After all," I said to Pete, "no one charges that you aren't a good superintendent. No one says that Miss Phipps is a poor principal."

"Of course not," Pete answered, looking surprised.

"These people seem rather proud of their school."

"Oh, yes," agreed Pete.

"Then what's all this rowing and talking got to do with reading and arithmetic?"

"Nothing at all," answered Pete, "nothing at all."

"What are you going to do about it?" "I believe," he said, "that I'll run up to Solon Center. They've ousted their man up there and are looking for a new one. I ought to get the job."

"What's the matter with that man?" I asked.

"There's a Democratic school board, and the present superintendent is a Republican," Pete said. "He was down here the other day, and I think he'll get this job. You see, his sister's husband is caretaker at the Peace church, here in B."

"What's that got to do with education?" I inquired again.

"Nothing at all," he admitted. Long lines of children were trailing up and down stairs.

"Come in here," said Pete, "and listen to these seniors. It's the class on civics and government."

An East Side American

The Autobiography of a Son of the City
By CHARLES STELZLE

HARLES STELZLE has appeared in many rôles. A brewer's son, a tenement district boy, a runner of errands, tobacco stripper, newsboy, cutter of artificial flowers, machinist, street preacher and minister, have been among the parts which he has

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played. When he was called to testify before the Special Committee of the United States Senate on April 21 about prohibition, he was classed as a surveyor. In this issue he tells the kind of a surveyor he is and how he earned that title. X

The Facts About Surveys

AKING surveys was an utterly thankless job, because a diagnosis of a city was not for the purpose of discovering its good points so much as it was to find out what in the city's life needed remedying. When reports were made to citizens, usually in public meetings, the facts produced were not especially complimentary. This often created feeling.

Survey work was an outstanding accomplishment growing out of the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor, which I headed. Not only were the fields of local churches studied and recommendations made as to the kind of work which should be conducted, but

entire cities and counties and States were
surveyed, covering social, economic, and
religious institutions.

One of the most successful surveys was
that made for the Men and Religion
Forward Movement, which was con-
ducted by the combined Protestant
churches and other religious enterprises
of the United States. Seventy principal
American cities with a combined popula-
tion of twenty millions were studied
during the winter of 1911 in preparation
for the campaign conducted by that
movement during the following year.
About one thousand questions were ad-
dressed to the local committees in charge
of the surveys in each of the cities, cov-

ering, among other things, population, municipal administration, social influences, housing, health, political life, social service agencies, public schools, libraries, recreational life, juvenile delinquency, and the general condition of the churches.

Sometimes there was a disposition to fight back when survey figures were published. But invariably whatever statements were made on the platform could be substantiated by statistics or other data which had been secured by trained investigators.

For example, in a city in northern New Jersey a mass-meeting was called for Sunday afternoon in a large theater

to present the findings of the survey and recommendations based upon them. As I was entering the theater for the afternoon meeting—and the place was packed —a friend met me at the door and cautioned me that the Health Commissioner was in the audience, and that he had threatened to "make a monkey out of me" before the crowd if I dared say anything there about health conditions.

Having been introduced, I approached the front of the stage and remarked that it was not a very pleasant task that had been assigned to me, but that I was going to give the city all the facts as I found them. "For example," I began, "take the Health Department." And I looked directly into the face of the Health Commissioner, who sat just beneath the platform. "I want to tell you something about how the department has failed to fulfill its functions in maintaining the health of your city. To substantiate what I shall say, here are some reports which one of my men secured in the office of the Health Department itself."

The Health Commissioner never opened his mouth, because he soon knew that I was correctly quoting figures which his own office had furnished.

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URING the Men and Religion For

ward Movement campaign it was my especial task to head up the social service section, having associated with me such men as Graham Taylor and Raymond Robins, of Chicago, and several members of the social service commissions of the various denominations, each of whom worked with separate teams of half a dozen men. In addition to having charge of all the surveys for the various cities and serving as the dean of the social service "experts," I was the leader of what was known as "Team 1" of the four or five teams which were in the field continuously for eight months. The entire task was under the direction of Fred B. Smith, whose matchless generalship was responsible for the success of what I regard as one of the most stirring social movements that ever swept this country.

My team was commanded to cover a chain of Southern cities. It would not be fair to mention them by name, because many of them were greatly handicapped by conditions for which they were not altogether to blame, as compared with some Northern cities which had much greater opportunity and longer experience in making progress in the social and educational field. The meetings in each city were continued for a week. Each man on the team held

three or four sessions a day. It was my particular task to meet the municipal authorities and other agencies which had to do with social problems. My recommendations were based upon studies which had been made by local committees; so I was not responsible for the facts presented. Ordinarily these studies had occupied some months' time.

Whenever an unusual situation was discovered, I tried to make a special visit or a closer analysis before discussing the question in public. In one city I visited the workhouse before addressing the city

(C) Underwood & Underwood

Fred B. Smith, a leader of men

commissioners and a group of nearly one hundred business men at a luncheon. At the workhouse I had found about thirty men, practically all Negroes, who belonged to the chain gang, occupied during the day in sweeping the streets of the city. The clothing worn during the day was slept in at night, and they were about as filthy as one can imagine. There was an old cast-iron bath-tub in the middle of the yard in which the men bathed, although it was the custom for about fifteen of them to bathe in the same water without change, and many of them had the most shocking forms of venereal diseases. When I addressed the business men, I pictured the situation as graphically as I knew how, and spoke with much feeling, closing my remarks with the statement:

"I would rather go to hell than be sent to your workhouse."

Needless to say, the city commissioners saw to it that conditions were cleaned up in that workhouse in a hurry, perhaps largely because the next day the leading newspaper in the city had a big

headline across the top of the front page which read:

"Stelzle Would Rather Go to. Hell Than Go to Our Workhouse."

In another city of the South I found what was really a frightful condition in the principal packing-house. Conditions in the public laundries were vile, and there were situations in several of the department-stores which were deplorable. It happened that the Daughters of the Confederacy were in session in the city while our meetings were in progress, and I was invited to address nearly two thousand women on "social conditions." It was not expected that I would speak on the situation in that city, but I reminded those women of the South that naturally they were far more interested in what was going on in the very city in which they were meeting than to have me talk about social problems in New York City, where I lived. Then I told my story, giving exact figures and facts, and using the plainest language possible. The audience was naturally greatly horrified, and many of them were indignant.

The evening paper printed the story of my address. I found out many years later that the story was written, not by a reporter, but by the wife of the editor, who happened to be in the audience, but who had never before written a newspaper article. I was somewhat surprised that the morning newspaper did not carry the story, but soon I discovered the reason. The managing editor of the evening paper which had printed it called me on the telephone at the hotel and wanted to know if I would stand for what I had said to the women the afternoon before. Then he told me that the owner of the packing-house whose conditions I had particularly emphasized had threatened to sue his paper for fifty thousand dollars. I replied that I would not only stand for what I had said but that the managers of the entire movement which I represented would back me financially and otherwise in making the fight clean through. fight clean through. Late in the day I learned that the owner of the packinghouse had gone to one of the leading business men of the city and had complained most bitterly of what I had said. "Did the fellow tell the truth?" asked the business man.

"Yes, he certainly had the goods," was the reply.

"Then why in hell don't you clean up your place?" said the business man. "What are you coming to me for?" That night I was to leave for another city. Just as I was getting ready the telephone in my hotel room rang, and, answering it, I listened to what was to

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