As to crime the records in Chicago show that we had in 1920, the first prohibition year, 87,000 arrests for all causes. In 1923 we have 176,000 arrests for all causes. They told us it would abolish drunkenness and disorderly conduct. When prohibition went into effect in 1920, we had 32,343 arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. In 1923, after experimenting with prohibition's salvation for three years, the arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct were 75,251, and that does not tell the whole story, because in the old days a man staggered through the open doors of a saloon and fell into the arms of a policeman, but when he gets drunk in a blind tiger, they keep him locked up and do not let him out for fear they might back-track him and raid the place. And the latter people get drunk at home these days, and you can not count them, because they are in their own homes, but here is an increase under prohibition from 32,000 to 75,000, which means 100 per cent or more. Let us

Well, you say, that is because this law is not enforced. see about that. You ask me can it be enforced? I come to one of the most important questions that I have been asked and one of the most important things which you have got to consider in the solution of this problem. Can this Volstead law be enforced? Yes, if you are ready to pay the price. The Volstead act is based upon the idea of not saving a man from somebody else, but saving him from himself, and if you are going to save him from himself, and that is the design of any sumptuary law, then you must not only become his guardian, but you must guard him all the time, and if half the people needed salvation by sumptuary law, we would just have one man to watch the other and no surplus, if anybody got sick. But suppose that a third of the people need salvation by sumptuary law, the other population, all the balance of us, would have to become saviors, and as a matter of fact you would need three saviors to every person that needed salvation in order to watch him all of the timethree shifts of eight hours each-because if you only watch him all day he would get drunk at night, and if you only watch him by night he will be drunk by daylight and go to hell just the same.

So, if you are going to save a man from himself, you have got to be with him all of the time. St. Paul said that if righteousness come by law, Christ died in vain; if salvation come by law, He died in vain. It can not come by law.

I respect a law that forbids one man from injuring another, but the people will not respect a law designed to save a man from himself.

Now, listen. To have three saviors to the man you must establish an absolute despotism and maintain constant repression. That is not necessary to support the law against theft and murder, because whether you steal or kill is everybody's business, but whether you take a drink is nobody's business, and if you have a law prohibiting taking a drink, nobody will help enforce it, unless you hire them, pay them a salary, and put a Gatling gun in their pocket.

Can it be enforced? Yes, if you are ready to destroy democracy and crucify liberty. That is the price you have got to pay, in addition to all the money it has cost, and the loss of farmer, the wage earner, and business disasters, and everything of that kind that we have been reciting.

I want to thank the committee for its consideration. I have tried to discuss some of the economical phases involved in the legislation that is proposed and which you now have under consideration. All that I have asked is for you to give it your careful consideration, for what it is worth, and remember above all things that it makes no difference what the value of prohibition might be, liberty is worth more to man, more to the race, than prohibition ever could be. Liberty, without which all other words are sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Give men liberty, and you give them life; you impart the secret of their divinity, you open wide the gates of achievement to the conquests of genius. Take liberty from men, and they become a thing, a machine that must answer to the whim of the master, and men have been deprived of their liberty, their right of decision, by the Volstead Act. Remove that much of the prohibition, at least, and give the real men, the real men of America, the right to decide their own case for themselves. No other person has a right to make a decision for himself and me too. Therefore, the whole idea is wrong, and it might be corrected and great good follow if you would amend the Volstead Act so as to give us light wines and beers, and then no man with any sense would think of buying this 10t, this poison, this junk, that is killing men, if they could get good beer and good wine.

Mr. CODMAN. I would now like to present the Rev. Roland W. Sawyer of Massachusetts.

Mr. DYER. How many more speakers have you to be heard?
Mr. CODMAN. Probably one more after this gentleman.

Mr. DYER. Where are these gentlemen from?

Mr. CODMAN. Rev. Sawyer comes from Ware, Mass.

Mr. DYER. Where is the other gentleman from? Is he from out of the city.

Mr. CODMAN. The other gentleman is from Baltimore. He would like to be heard after Mr. Sawyer.

Mr. DYER. The committee does not care to sit very much longer. We will hear the Rev. Mr. Sawyer.

STATEMENT OF REV. ROLAND W. SAWYER, OF WARE, MASS.

Mr. SAWYER. Mr. Chairman and gentleman of the committee, ever since the Federal Congress passed a law, nearly four years ago, saying anything over one-half of 1 per cent alcohol was intoxicating, and that any amount of harder liquors employed for medicine in quantities over one pint in ten days was not legitimate, those two positions in the Volstead Act have been under more or less fire and, as I understand it, this committee is now gathering evidence to see whether or not it shall submit to the floor of the House a bill to give us a more sane and sensible interpretation of what is intoxicating liquor, in the hope that it may be backed up by public sentiment and enforced, or whether we shall take our stand with the statute as it now exists and continue with that.

I come down here from New England to say out of my experience, which is an experience that comes from direct contact with the people, observing and studying their habits and lives, that I feel, and that a great number of us feel up there, that we are losing ground, that we are making a mistake to continue the present rigid provisions of the

Volstead Federal statute, and that we believe it would be a gain for the people if the statute could be liberalized as these bills before you provide, that there might be given to the common people, the working people, a popular beverage which would at the same time be practically harmless and which would by its popularity and relish drive out the injurious stuff that they are now drinking and forming the habit of drinking.

A few nights ago I heard Burton Russel deliver an address on the war situation, which was very pessimistic. He found, in closing, his only hope to be that after all the human race will learn by experience to do better. And that is our hope. We learn by experience. It is the only thing we have to go by, and particularly is that so, gentlemen, with men like this committee and men who are in the Federal Congress.

The making of a law is to make static some progress that the human race has made, some position it has come to occupy through education and adjustment, and make that firm, static, weave it into an institution.

In making laws we have to compromise, especially in a democracy where the people themselves make the laws. Law making is a compromise. We have to back and fill. We have to take steps ahead and then perhaps go back. Sometimes we find that we have made a mistake, and I believe that our experience has shown that we made a mistake when we passed the Volstead Act four years ago.

So I have no apologies to make in advocating a change in the law, a law which has worked so badly as the Volstead Act. We did not reach finality when we wrote the provisions of that law, and final wisdom was not given to the men who framed that act. This question of intemperance in the use of alcoholic beverages, which has been troubling the human race for so many thousands of years, was not finally settled when Andrew Volstead presented to the House of Representatives the bill which bears his name. I have the greatest admiration, the further I go in life the more my admiration increases, for the founders of the organic law of our Nation and of our several States, and as one looks at the provisions of the Federal Constitution he feels that those men were almost inspired, that is his feeling as he realizes the wisdom of the provisions they made for the safeguarding of our body politic in that Constitution; and yet that Constitution has been changed many times, it carries many amendments. It is the same thing with the State constitutions.

Shall we say that Franklin and Jefferson and Madison were less able and less wise than Wayne Wheeler and Andrew Volstead and William Anderson? When we know that finality of wisdom was not even given to those founders of our Government in those days, and that even they could not form an organic law that needed no change, can we believe that Volstead and Wheeler and Anderson could present in your House of Representatives and carry votes for a law that should not be changed?

Merely to ask that question is to give us the answer that we want. And so I say that because experience has shown to us that the Volstead Act is a failure, and because I believe that we ought to give the eighteenth amendment an honest trial, I am appearing here as a friend of the eighteenth amendment, because I believe the eighteenth amendment should have an honest trial, and I believe

we ought to modify our enforcement code. We must modify that code if we are going to give the eighteenth amendment that great experiment, as President Harding called it-anything like a fair trial. It was a startling innovation to put a legislative act into the organic law. But that was all discussed and thrashed out by the Federal legislative body, and the eighteenth amendment was adopted. That is past history. That is water that has gone over the mill. But the enforcement code, to interpret and enforce that amendment, has never been so well accepted. The temper of our people was such that drastic as the eighteenth amendment was they accepted it, a majority of them in good faith. The temper of the people has been such that they can not accept the Volstead enforcement code. The Literary Digest straw vote-and I have never known an honest straw vote to be taken but what it correctly reflected the feelings of the people showed that 68 out of 100 were dissatisfied with the Volstead Act, and that same ballot, if carried through, would show the same majority dissatisfied with it, all the way through.

What are some of the reasons why we are dissatisfied with the Volstead Act? First, it has sent liquor into the homes. All of our agitation for temperance since 1840 has been to get liquor out of the homes. Father Matthews' Societies, Sons of Temperance, the Washington movement, all the education in the public schools and by the religious societies has been to drive liquor out of the homes, to enable us to bring up a generation of young people who did not have liquor around them and did not see the results of drinking and drunkenness, and we were succeeding very well. I have been a pastor in three industrial cities in Massachusetts, and it was amazing how well we were succeeding in the movement for temperance before the prohibition amendment was adopted. Our young men were not going into the saloons.

Mr. YATES. What were the cities?

Mr. SAWYER. Brockton and Haverhill, and Ware, an industrial town of 10,000 people. As you went by the saloons you saw men 45 or 50 years of age, mostly workingmen, in the saloons, but not the young fellows; the young men did not patronize them. The workmen had kept the liquor away from their homes, the business men kept liquor away from their homes, and the younger generation was growing up without being in contact or seeing the evil of liquor. But the Volstead Act has driven liquor back into the homes. We are raising a generation that are seeing their fathers and friends making home brew and distilling liquor. They are hearing it discussed in the homes, what recipe will make the best liquor, will give the most kick; we are undoing the educational work that had been going on for 80 years. Now, it would be well if any problem in society might be settled by simply getting a majority to favor it, even a majority of one, and pass a law and do away with the evil. But we can not do it that way. Education, moral suasion, experience, environment have to be taken into account.

Last week I rode into the city one morning with an Episcopal clergyman who told me of the increasing number of people in his parish who invited him to have a drink, invited him into their homes to take a drink. He said that formerly he received such invitations only on rare occasions, but now that it was a very common thing to be invited to go into a man's home and take a drink. He said

that they were experimenting in making different kinds of liquor, and that liquor can be found in homes by the gallon, whereas before they would only buy a bottle, perhaps, at a time.

The Volstead Act has given us a new criminal class and a large, threatening, criminal class, a criminal class of young and reckless boys, who do not have the restraint of age or experience, and they are a great menace to our society. The Volstead Act has substituted the vile bootleg liquor for the 2.75 per cent beer that was on the market when the amendment was adopted. This certainly has been a great loss to the temperance problems, the temperance situation. I venture to say that when 2.75 per cent beer was sold as many as 18 out of 20 people who drank at all drank that very mild beer. The situation is different now. Take a lot of working people such as you find in my present town. They used to go off on a clam bake in the old days and have their 2.75 per cent beer, and there was no drunkenness among them. They passed a pleasant day. Now, what do they take? They dig up a half dozen bottles of moonshine which they take on their clam bake, and the result is drunkenness, and not only that, but they are sick the next day after their picnic.

Farmers in New England, where the farms are small propositions and they have only one or two hired men, are having great trouble with their hired men. These hired men seem bound to get something to drink on Saturday night, and the result is that they are sick Monday morning after their day off. The physical and nervous reaction puts them out of commission for two or three days.

When I was a pastor in the city of Brockton we had a great Swedish and Norwegian population, splendid, industrious people, splendid citizens. They voted no license for that city time and time again; they did not care for the saloon or bar. On a Saturday or holiday some one of them would order a keg of beer sent out from Boston, and they would meet and pitch quoits and have a good time, but there was no disorder or trouble. The situation is not so good to-day, because they can not get from Boston their keg of beer and they have recourse to vile liquor, and the result is drunkenness and sickness and broils and troubles.

Mr. YATES. I would like to ask a question there. Perhaps I ought to know, but I do not. You spoke of the alcohol content of beer as being 2.75. What established that?

Mr. SAWYER. That was the war measure during President's Wilson's term

Mr. YATES. I supposed so, some proclamation?

Mr. SAWYER. Yes.

Mr. YATES. What was it, where did that 2.75 come from?

Mr. SAWYER. The war provision made a rule that the brewers should not manufacture beer with over 2.75 per cent alcohol. I think that ran for nearly a year and a half.

Mr. YATES. It was some regulation or proclamation, was it?

Mr. SAWYER. The President of the United States, in order to save grain during the war, to feed the boys abroad, issued a proclamation or made a regulation whereby the brewers should not brew beer over 2.75 alcohol content.

Mr. YATES. You have repeatedly spoken of the 2.75 beer as if it were an established fact.