1 it is supposed to be. But it has ays been plentiful in this country, so istry has come to count on it. But it Id get along better with less. Scarcity abor inevitably necessitates the use of or-saving devices.

f common labor had not been so plentiOccupational disease would never have come so serious a problem. In the first ce, when men are scarce employers e care not to lose any, but, more imrtant still, machinery is then substituted

men in the dangerous trades. The d industry has given an example of this. began, for reasons of economy, subtuting enclosed machinery for the ngerous work of separating white lead >m the scraps of metallic lead which had iled to corrode. This proved such a saving th in labor and material that in the est mills entirely enclosed machinery undles the lead in all the formerly danerous transitions from the drying pans to e lead-in-oil paste. This has done away ith more labor susceptible to industrial isease. The latest labor-saving device a crane which has eliminated the dusty heel-barrows that counted their victims y the hundreds. This has also proved uch an economy that the lead com

panies are experimenting with mechanical means for stripping the beds where the white lead is formed. Portable exhausts are in use in some lead mills, but the whole operation is still dangerous and clumsy. When that problem is solved, lead will be produced much more cheaply, lead mills will be perfectly safe, and the amount of common labor will be cut at least in two. The devices already in use by the National Lead Company have in the last ten years cut down the necessary common labor by 25 per cent.

At least an equal saving could be made in industry as a whole by labor-saving devices now in existence. But so long as men can be had to do the work as cheaply as machinery there is no incentive to make the investment. If immigration were checked sufficiently to make common labor less available, this incentive would then bring about so rapid a substitution of labor-saving machinery that the demand for common labor would fall off and, in its place, there would arise a greater demand for skilled labor. We could then approach the German industrial ideal with industrial accident and industrial disease under control and the rapid disappearance of common labor.

N

EARLY three quarters of the area of the United States is "dry" territory. Half the American people live out of reach of a licensed saloon. This is in a large measure the work of the Anti-Saloon League, the militant Church in practical politics. The Leam. done more in twenty years th

hibition Party has in fifty. For twenty years it has been testing and proving the efficiency of its political methods, until now it can forecast with a reasonable degree of certainty just what the people of any given part of the United States or the whole United States will do with the prohibition question whenever it is made

It has become probably the

most active and effective political agency in the country.

The Anti-Saloon League is not a political party. It is a league of organizations, and these organizations are, chiefly, the Christian churches of America, of almost every denomination, creed, and sect. The Anti-Saloon League is, in fact, the Church in politics- the modern "Church Militant." And the Holy War in which it is engaged is the nation-wide crusade against the saloon.

Many people politicians especially politicians especially think the only way to accomplish reforms is to organize a new political party. The Populists thought so, but many of their doctrines, which now form part of the platforms of our present-day parties, made no headway until long after the Populist party was dead and gone. Conversely, there never was a Woman Suffrage party. And the Anti-Saloon League, working for a single object through existing political machinery and parties, has accomplished in twenty years what the Prohibition party never even partly succeeded in

doing it has made the prohibition issue a live one in almost every state and the dominant issue in many states.

When the League was organized, twenty years ago, outside of a few thinly populated prohibition states there was hardly a spot on the map of the United States where | liquor was not sold openly and legally. To-day, 72 per cent. of the total area of the the United States-2,130,746 square miles is "dry" territory. There are nine states in which it is illegal to sell liquor anywhere in the commonwealth:

Arkansas has just passed a law requiring a petition signed by all the adult white men and women in any community before a saloon can be opened, practically insuring state-wide prohibition.

On the other hand, there is not a single state that is entirely "wet." New Jersey comes nearest, with only four tenths of one per cent. of its area prohibition. Three quarters of Pennsylvania is "license" territory. But Illinois and Missouri are each 72 per cent. "dry" and 58 per cent. of New York State is prohibition territory. The Anti-Saloon League has hardly made itself felt as yet in the larger cities. It is working toward the cities-surrounding them with areas of prohibition territory and masses of prohibition sentiment. All the nine states now having state-wide prohibition laws are distinctly rural communities. Only slightly more than 20 per cent. of the population of any of them live in the cities. Only two of the prohibition states have cities of 100,000 population - Georgia and Tennessee. More than half the people of seventeen other states live in territory that is "dry" under local option laws. Nine of these states have no cities of 100,000 population. Six others have one such city each, and Minnesota has two. There are thirteen states in which between 25 and 50 per cent. of the people live in "dry" territory, and in these thirteen states there are twentytwo cities with a population of 100,000 or

In the remaining nine states and the District of Columbia less than 25 per cent. of the population live under prohibition laws, and these states contain fifteen cities of 100,000 population or more, in which 71 per cent. of their people live. With this situation as its encouragement, the Anti-Saloon League now announces its intention to attempt to bring about an amendment to the Federal Constitution prohibiting the liquor traffic throughout the United States.

Whether the same elements of strength that enable the League practically to dominate politics in the rural states and in the rural districts of most of the other states will prove strong enough to make national prohibition an issue at the next Congressional election, as the League

plans, or even at the tenth Congressional election from now, I do not attempt to predict, much less to forecast the result when the issue shall be squarely raised. But the League has accomplished results in Washington. It can point to a long list of prohibition legislation enacted at the Capitol as a result of its efforts, beginning with the abolition of the canteen from the army posts and winding up with the Webb-Kenyon law, passed in the last days of the last Congress by a two-thirds majority in each house over President Taft's veto, forbidding the shipment in interstate commerce into "dry" territory of intoxicants intended to be sold.

This latest evidence of the power of rural influence in Congress gave the final fillip to the League's long-cherished plan of a nation-wide campaign for national prohibition. Of course, that is a tremendous undertaking, but on the other hand few people who have not studied its progress know the power of the AntiSaloon League. Saloon League. It has won victory after victory against the political forces of an entire state, gaining its points in a hostile legislature and carrying county after county against all the money and political power of the liquor interests of the world's greatest whiskey markets. The Church in the form of the League is far abler in politics than is the saloon. The reason is clear. It is the old story of a conflict between money and a moral principle. And whenever the issue between dollars and principles has been raised in this country, principles have always won in the long run. Let me quote from the Rev. Purley A. Baker, general superintendent of the League:

The Anti-Saloon League is the federated Church in action against the saloon. Its agents are of the Church and under all circumstances loyal to the Church. It has no interests apart from the Church. It goes just as fast and just as far as the public sentiment of the Church will permit. It has not come to the Kingdom simply to build a little local sentiment or to secure the passage of a few laws, nor yet to vote the saloons from a few hundred towns. These are mere incidents in its progress. It has come to solve the liquor problem.

This big idea that the Church must meet the saloon on its own ground and fight it with its own weapons

came to Mr. Howard H. Russell, a student at Oberlin, more than twenty-five years ago. He tried in various places Indianapolis, Kansas City, Berea, Chicago, and in Massachusetts to get the Church to go into politics, but the church people were not yet ready to undertake something so far removed from what they had been taught was the function of the Church. At last, on May 24, 1893, at a meeting held in the college library at Oberlin, he persuaded a small group of enthusiasts to try his plan and on the following Fourth of July, a Sunday, the Ohio Anti-Saloon League was formally launched at a union meeting in the First Congregational Church of Oberlin. Meanwhile, on June 23d, the Anti-Saloon League of the District of Columbia had been formed under the leadership of Bishop Luther B. Wilson, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1894, at the suggestion of Archbishop Ireland, of the Roman Catholic Church, the Rev. A. J. Kynett, chairman of the Permanent Committee on Temperance and Prohibition of the Methodist Episcopal Church, worked out a plan for uniting all the church forces that were working toward that end, and from this resulted the AntiSaloon League of America, formed at Washington on December 18, 1895, with the existing local Leagues and forty-five other temperance organizations in its membership. Dr. Russell, the date of whose meeting at Oberlin is regarded as the birthday of the League, was chosen national superintendent.

The Ohio Anti-Saloon League had made little progress in its efforts to get the churches to cross denominational lines and to coöperate with one another, and to get church members to work and vote outside of their old party affiliations. Enough headway had been made, however, to give encouragement to the movement, and under Dr. Russell's leadership state leagues began to be formed everywhere and the opening guns of the political battle were fired.

Up to 1900 there were few results and several serious setbacks, but in that year

.

the League's machinery began to ope more efficiently. In Arkansas and braska it took the field against the gr ors in office and materially reduced majorities for reëlection, and severa the League's law-enforcement bills passed in other states. From then the record of the League's work is o victory upon victory, with only e occasional setbacks to spur the ka on to greater efforts. All over the com legislatures began passing local or laws and counties, townships, and m cipalities began voting "dry" under the laws. By the end of 1903 the interests began to wake up to the fact. they had a new and dangerous foe to me From that year the issue has been squar joined, and every year has seen an inca ing proportion of victories for the Lea The Ohio Anti-Saloon League, of the state bodies, is perhaps the 5 active politically. When Dr. Russel> came general superintendent of national organization, the Rev. Ph A. Baker took his place as Ohio superintendent. Dr. Baker was a court preacher. I might go farther and him an old-fashioned country preach of the kind of which America has produ so many- self-made men mighty eloquence, confident in faith, power. to stir the hearts of men. He might ha become another Dwight L. Moody c second John B. Gough if he had not real that the times demanded action instead talk. He was born in Jackson Coun Ohio, in 1858, but he is as young in s to-day as he was when, a boy of thirte the exigency of a stepfather compe him to go to work as a farm-hand. "farmed it" summers and went to sch winters, first at Williamsport, then the Xenia Normal School. Teach school and studying law meantime, attended a Methodist revival meet and was converted. Although not admitted to the bar, he had won a siderable local fame as an orator, and day the pastor of his church invited to attend a quarterly conference. The the minister asked the assembled al to license Brother Baker to did, and a week from the

reached his first sermon to the people f his home church. He has been a reacher ever since. "Jasper Circuit, Pike County," was his first charge truly ural both in name and fact. He "rode ircuit" in a buckboard for two years, erving six churches and preaching three ermons every Sunday and two during he week. Half the time he was also ninistering to the four churches of the djoining circuit. Then he got a village harge at Racine, then a larger church at Gallipolis, and then went to the Third Street Methodist Church of Columbus, vhere, two years later, Dr. Russell ound him and drafted him into the service of the Anti-Saloon League. He was irst field secretary, then superintendent of the Cleveland district, then state superintendent.

"State superintendent" in the AntiSaloon League means chief political organzer and head lobbyist. Mr. Baker knew politics, and especially rural politics. He knew rural Ohio and its people and he had lived long enough in Columbus to get a few accurate, first-hand impressions of the General Assembly in action. Under his guidance the Ohio Anti-Saloon League began to exert an influence at the State House that resulted in the passage of a municipal local option law, in 1902, under which 500 villages and cities have since voted "dry," and incidentally brought about the permanent retirement from politics of a number of the strongest friends of the liquor interests. Then, in 1904, Dr. Russell resigned to give his entire attention to the work in New York and Dr. Baker was elected to succeed him as general superintendent.

Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, a young lawyer who had become a temperance worker when a student at Oberlin, was chosen Dr. Baker's successor as state superintendent of the Ohio Anti-Saloon League. The Anti-Saloon League of Ohio is now probably the most powerful single political influence in the state. It has never lost a vital point in its ten-years' war under 1 Mr. Wheeler's generalship. It was the first of the state leagues to go into a gubernatorial contest and win.. it the

7 dominant party with a candi

of its

own choosing. In 1905, it declared war on Governor Myron T. Herrick, for his action in killing a residence-district local option bill in the General Assembly. This had not seemed a dangerous thing for Governor Herrick to do. The Republican party had been solidly intrenched in Ohio ever since the Civil War. Governor Herrick was sure of a renomination at the hands of his party, and a Republican nomination had always meant election in Ohio. The Anti-Saloon League offered its support to the Democratic party, provided a candidate satisfactory to it were nominated, and Mr. John M. Pattison, an active supporter of the League and a worker in the Methodist Church, was nominated and elected - the first Democratic governor of Ohio in nearly half a century.

This Ohio victory stimulated the enthusiasm of the Anti-Saloon League throughout the Middle West. By this time state leagues had been organized everywhere. The Illinois League had elected three Prohibition members to the legislature, one from Peoria, the old home of the whiskey trust. Kentucky, long boastful of its whiskey, in 1906 enacted a local option law, and now there are only a few scattering "wet" spots in the Blue Grass state, outside of the three largest cities. By 1907 the League's work was under full headway. The country preacher from the Jasper circuit was reaping the fruits of his Ohio experience. Alabama passed a county option law and twentyfour counties immediately voted "dry,” one of them including the city of Birmingham. Arkansas abolished all saloons outside of the cities. Colorado enacted a municipal local option law. Georgia voted for state-wide prohibition. All Delaware except New Castle County voted "dry," and eight more North Carolina counties abolished the saloon. Governor Cobb, of Maine, began to enforce the old prohibition law and eleven Virginia municipalities outlawed the dram-shop. The next year, 1908, Mississippi and North Carolina adopted state-wide prohibition, the latter by referendum, which carried by more than 44,000 majority. More than 11,000 saloons were closed in the United States