COUNTING THE COST

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 102, 27 October 1925, Page 11

COUNTING THE COST

A LAWLESS BUSINESS,

CORRUPTION RAMPANT.

(By HENRY BOURNE JOY, Director Packard Car Co., and formcrlv Director Federal Reserve Bank

at Chicago.)

"The almost countless-millions of dollars which have been appropriated and spent in five years to accomplish the enforcement of bone dry Prohibition have failed in that accomplishment. Not only has this country failed, as naturally must be the case, to mako itself bone dry at tho vast cost of the appropriations for the dry armies and dry navies, but also it has been foregoing during that period a revenue which it might readily havo in its national treasury of approximately five hundred millions of dollars per annum, excise tax, and an amount of money approximating that sum has been going to the purveyors of alcoholic beverages, whom some people call bootleggers ajid others call merchant princes.

"Our Courts are consigning to gaol, to associate with thugs, murderers, burglars, and every sort of villain, a large number of decent young men who have taken a chance of making easy money by purveying liquor across the borders. Men have always taken such risks for easy money. Men always will take such risks for easy money. They aro not cheating our Customs nor defrauding the Government of revenue, because there is no duty on the goods im--I'orteil. They tnko the risk for the easy money. Again human nature prevails. '■ "it is perfectly siife to sfnte today that this country cannot survive with hull! of its people trying to put the other half of its population in the pciiitontiarics of our cuunlry for following the nniural dictates ot human instiacLs. " —''The North -American Kevioiv.' 1 ]f'2">.

A la iv which makes criminals of penple who are not, criminals and which would transform this country inlo ». kind of penal settlement is not a fit la-vr for New ZealaucL—Adrt.