A considerable number of the latter were "boot-leggers" in jail
for selling whiskey. Out of the 1,017 jailers, only 181 placed their estimate
below twenty-five per cent, and fifty-five of these were from empty
jails in prohibition territory. The relation of drink to pauperism is much
the same as that of drink to crime. Of 73,045 paupers in all the alms-
houses of the country, 37,254 are there through drink.
According to official statistics as gathered by Commissioner Carroll
D. Wright, of the Bureau of Labor, there are 140 cities in the country
having a population of 30,000 and upwards.
In these cities there were in 1898, 294,820 people arrested for drunkeness,
almost ten times as many as now comprise our army in the Philippines.
If this great army of drunkards were marshalled for a parade, marching
twenty abreast, it would require four and one-half days, marching
ten hours a day, for them to pass a given point. And these 295,000
drunks do not include the arrests for "disorderly conduct," "assault" and
a dozen other offences which grow out of the licensed rum business. The
total arrests for all causes in these cities was 915,167. Counting the
moderate estimate of three-fourths of these as being the victims of the
lawful saloons, it would require more than a week's marching twenty abreast,
for the great procession to stagger past a reviewing stand, and the rum
product of only 140 cities heard from.
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