The fact of the matter is: that in the time when the situation of the unemployed is most aggravated—when it attracts nation-wide attention—singularly enough, no voice was raised, either by individuals, societies, labor organizations, or the press, publicly, attributing the abnormal and distressing conditions to the drink habit.

All these know better. They know, as the New York Association discovered by its investigation, that inability to find work, and sickness, has brought the great army of idle men and women to their plight. They know that our productive ability is increasing much more rapidly than our consumptive capacity, and that the statesmen-ship of this country as well as that of every other country in the world is grappling not with any merely individual or national, but with a world problem.

They know that in China, with its hundreds of millions of frugal, temperate, hard-toiling people; in Turkey, with its sober, industrious, Mahomet-worshiping masses; in India, with its almost countless thousands, governed by strict religious, moral and ethical codes,—the trouble is identical: it is economic. In the present industrial system of those lands, as well as our own, there is no longer work enough for all, not sufficient jobs for the number of toilers, and thus, necessarily and unfortunately, there must be the great bodies of the unemployed.

The trouble lies in the industrial and social system, and not in the individual primarily, whether he be Turk, Chinaman, Hindoo or Christian. All the statistics gathered from every available source will bear out the assertion that the problem is economic, and it is only unwise presumption that will even attempt to lay these distressing conditions and results to the drink habit.But you may explode this popular fallacy of the prohibitionist into atoms, and he persistently gathers together the fragmentary portions of his fanciful theory, and comes back with the same old story and tells it in the same old way.

Perhaps he realizes that to allow its peaceful demise, means to leave Prohibition standing absolutely without a remedy for the problem of unemployment or the general industrial conditions of over-production. Then, having no practical remedy for intemperance, no remedy for the ills and troubles of the working-class, and no remedy for anything else, he should graciously step aside and make room for the real world-movements for improvement and progress along rational and practical lines of individual and national development.

He ought to realize that in the final analysis all evils are connected with life itself, for evil is not in things, but in men or women who abuse or misuse things. And he should recognize the patent truth that “you cannot legislate men by civil action into the performance of good and righteous deeds.”