PROHIBITION: Prosit!

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Lever or Club? Last week both professional Wets and Drys wished they knew the answer to the question: What effect will beer have upon the war for Repeal? Wets prayed that the first excitement over beer's return would quickly subside into a system of non-political control which would demonstrate the country's capacity to handle hard liquor with decent moderation, a lever for Repeal.

No honest Wet was more concerned about the future than Commander Fred George Clark of the Crusaders. The Clark doctrine is that the liquor problem has three sides—the Wet side, the Dry side, the Right side. Last month he sent a telegram to Wet and Dry organizations saying that the return of beer presented a situation which would lead either to true temperance or to the return of the "liquor trade" and the saloon. He wanted cooperation in a nationwide campaign for socially constructive liquor laws.

Dr. Clarence True Wilson, Methodist moralist, and in less generous vein Dr. Francis Scott McBride for the Anti-Saloon League, promised to cooperate. Not so Mrs. Ella Alexander Boole, the bustling matriarch of the W. C. T. U., whose plan is to find horrid examples of what 3.2% beer can do and use them to club down Repeal in perhaps 16 states, three more than enough to kill it.* She replied to Crusader Clark: "I assume you wired me for publicity purposes. ..."

In Washington, Mrs. Charles Henry Sabin and her ladies convened at the fourth annual convention of the W. O. N. P. R. Said she: "It would be glorious to continue in the vein of ecstasy, but it would be premature. . . . Repealists now face perhaps the hardest engagement of our great fight."

First Engagement of the fight was pitched in Michigan last week. It resulted in a 3-to-1 victory for Wets and the 21st Amendment. The vote: for Repeal, 834,675; against, 271,052.

Next day Wisconsin instructed all 15 of its convention delegates to vote for Repeal April 25.