For many years the Prohibitionists have systematically promulgated the fallacy that the poverty of the working class is caused by drink. And this they continue to do in face of all the facts, amply proven by all available statistics, that flatly contradict the fallacy.

On the question of poverty and drink, the opinion of Francis E. Willard ought to be accepted by the Prohibitionists first of all. She says:

“For myself, twenty-three years of study and observation have convinced me that poverty is the prime cause of intemperance, and that misery is the mother and hereditary appetite the father of the drink hallucination.... For this reason I have become an advocate of such a change in social conditions as shall stamp out the disease of poverty even as medical science is stamping out leprosy, smallpox, and cholera; and I believe the age in which we live will yet be characterized as one of those dark, dismal, and damning ages when some people were so dead to the love of their kind that they left them in poverty without a heartache or a blush.”

An editorial in the New York World some time ago contained the following significant statement:

“Only two families in every hundred of the 1575 which have been in the care of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor this summer were brought to poverty through intemperance. The percentage goes against preconceived notions and is, indeed, surprisingly small. It should disturb that prosperous complacency which sees in poverty only or mainly the penalty for wanton misdeed. The Association’s report for 1909 showed that intemperance, imprisonment, desertion, ‘shiftlessness and inefficiency,’ all told, accounted for not 12 per cent of those brought to want. The figures for that year showed that 65 per cent of the poverty was due to two causes—sickness and unemployment.”

Carroll D. Wright, in the “Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commission of Labor,” shows that only one-fourth of one per cent of all cases of non-employment in the United States is due to intemperance.

During the winter months of 1913-14, the number of unemployed men and women in the United States was appalling. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the large cities, were taxed to the utmost to care for the “jobless.”

It was estimated that New York City had its quota of 400,000 idle, Chicago 200,000, San Francisco 30,000. Organized armies of the unemployed clamored for work and for bread, and in the country districts idle men were everywhere tramping to and fro in search of work. “THE UNEMPLOYED” was a standing headliner of the public press. Suicides from inability to find work were startlingly prevalent; and the whole country was perplexed as to how to adjust complex conditions so as to relieve untold suffering and misery.

Were the Prohibitionists on hand at that time with any sort of a program, solution or panacea for the difficulty? Not at all. All their efforts were reserved for election day; their energies stored up for the glad time when well-paid agitators travel the country in Pullman cars to tell the people of rural communities that “poverty is caused by drink.”