PROHIBITION: Hearings End

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The subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week closed its hearings on prohibition, and so a great talk fest came to an end. So much of a propaganda matter was it for both sides, and so little immediate political interest had the hearings, that it was even doubtful whether a report would be made summarizing the "evidence."

In the closing week any number of bishops and leaders of prohibition- supporting societies declared their faith in prohibition. Mayor Dever rushed down from Chicago to deny testimony given by a Federal attorney that Chicago was full of bootlegging and to wipe out "a blot on the fair name of his city." Even some Yale students were called to testify to the result of a vote taken in the University in which students and faculty voted 4 to 1 for modification of prohibition, and declared that students got just as much liquor now as ever before. Professor Irving Fisher of the University denied that there was as much drinking at the University now as formerly.

The great scene of the hearing did not take place, however. Wayne B. Wheeler, counsel for the Anti-Saloon League, did not take the stand, and Senator James A. Reed, the one Wet inquisitor, did not have a chance to ask him the embarrassing question which the Wets had anticipated.

But Mr. Wheeler summed up for the Drys as did Colonel Julian Codman for the Wets, and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Lincoln C. Andrews in charge of prohibition wound up with a final appearance (his fourth) and denied that he was in favor of modifying the prohibition law except to put more teeth in it.

So, when it was all over, the net result of the investigation was to furnish just a little more ammunition for Wets and Drys alike and to prepare the way for political campaigns on the prohibition issue, which are apparently in the making in Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York.