HERBERT HOOVER.

White Ribbon, Volume 33, Issue 404, 18 March 1929, Page 1

HERBERT HOOVER.

Once more the PS.A. lias elected for her chief citizen, a man of the people. Herbert Hoover, like Lincoln, was the son of poor parents. By his own efforts he worked his way through college. He married a fellow-student, and in many lands she proved a help indeed to her liusba n d. During the war, Hoover organised the vast machine that fed a starving Europe. When the Mississippi and her tributary streams overflowed, and deluged millions of acres and miles of country, and rendered thousands homeless; then Hoover was sent out to organise relief ami to do all possible to repair the damage. Again, when U.S.A. was suffering from a Crime Wave, the sober citizens faced the fact that it people flout one law' and refuse to enforce it, they weaken the power of every iaw. The problem of Law' Enforcement took on a wider, deeper significance. If the Eighteenth Amendment was treated lightly, if the breaking of Prohibition Law was winked at, then all law's were in danger, and lawlessness wras becoming rampant. The Presidential Election was a crucial test, a clear-cut issue between wet ard dry. Hoover, a Quaker, the son of a White Ribboner, a man of high ideals, declared his intention to see the law' enforced. At the W.C.T.U. Convention of 1927, the women had promised, “Wherever He leads us we will follow, even if it leads us to the breaking of political pait.v ties. That promise they kept. Women

registered and voted as they had never done before. They worked, they distributed literature, and once again they proved to politicians, that tiie w'ay to get the woman’s vote out, is to have at stake a great moral issue that stirs the hearts and appeals to the judgments of 11 inking citizens. “The Union Signal” thus sums u;> the position:-

SOME ENCOURAGING P.vCTS. Never, since the ratificnUon of the Eighteenth Amendment by forty-six of the forty-eight states of the Union, has the voice of the people of this nation been heard so emphatically in support of prohibition as at the Presidential Election on November 6th. The opponents desired a national referendum on the subject and they, got it. Out from the so-called wet East and the great cities, from the dry South and the rural districts, came the emphatic call for the continuation of the national policy of the prohibition of the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors. State after state in the Solid Democratic South elected a straight Democratic state ticket but refused to vote for their Presidential candidate because he announced himself against the Eighteenth Amendment. Not only were the dry candidates for President and Vice-President elected; but dry candidates were generally eleoted for the l nited States Congress and for state and local offices. It is coming to be a very difficult thing for any wet candidate to be elected anywhere in the United States at any time.

The observation that every succeeding Congress is drier than the last will hold good for the Seventyfirst. In the Senate, dry men have been elected to succeed some of the bitterest wets—Senators Bruce of Maryland. Gerry of Rhode Island. Reed of Missouri, Bayard of Delaware. Another militant. Senator Edwards of New Jersey, will not return, but his successor unfortunately is not dry. In the House of Representatives, which could count only sixty-one wet votes on a roll call last year, the number of drys has also been increased. Colorado rejoices in going back to her old position of having a 100 per <smt. dry representation, having defeated Judge White, a wet, wiio was sent for an unexpired term last year. Of the three new' women members in the House, two. Mrs Ruth Bryan Owen and Mrs Ruth Hanna McCormick. take their stand with the dry 8. And why did women vote so solidly for a dry President? They voted to save the children from th.* blighting influence of the open saloon. Here are a few pars from an address by the Headmaster of Harvard School: PERSONAL LIBERTY —YES, FOR THE CHILDREN! We are, therefore, pretty apt to laugh at this w'hole claim of personal liberty. If there is any value to it at all it applies to the liberty of the children, that is, the freedom of the children from any and all influences that tend to retard their spiritual development; and I know what I an 1 talking about in regard to this.

For twenty-five years my work has been among the children of the poor. I have seen the baleful influence of liquor manifesting itself in the lives of women and children. It has been my privilege to see the coming of prohib’tion. I have seen the wiping out cf the saloon. I have seen the passing of this dreadful shadow from the lives of the children. I have seen the children coming to school better dressed, better fed and better cared for. 1 have seen them playing on the selfsame corners with no obscenity to shock them and no evil sights to destroy their spiritual perceptions. I have seen the passing of the drunk from the streets; and I want to say right here that these calamity howlers who speak about conditions being worse to-day than they were before prohibition either are talking out of the fullness of their own imaginations or are deliberately perverting the truth.

The streets of Boston to-cLav are clean; and I invite the members of this convention to go abroad in any section of the city day or night and bear witness to this truth that 1 am staging. If. now and then, you do find a drunk, his very appearance shows that he is of the most abandoned character and he is quickly rounded up and placed w r here he cannot give scandal to the children of the community. I, therefore, say, and I say it with all truth and earnestness, that this question of prohibition is a vital factor in any plan for character development among our children. It is the biggest single factor in the nation-wide success that we hope for. We can point out to them that they must prepare themselves to carry on this idealistic conception of life and in the strength oi their own generation remove forever the traces of this evil that are still hanging over from ? degraded day. I say this because I am convinced that the future of prohibition and its ultimate success lies only temporarily in the hands of the present generation. The new race is coming, in which education is rapidly preparing the groundwork of mentality and spirituality that will no more tolerate the degrading horrors of the liquor traffic than tinpresent generation tolerates that of opium.