Should the state undertake to regulate the liquor business or to enforce liquor laws?
Is it possible to devise any working plan which will apply with equal effectiveness and equity in communities of compact and of scattered population?
Should, or should not, the principle of self-government be carefully preserved in the whole scheme of legislation to regulate the liquor business?
Whether the present prohibition wave shall wash away the legalized saloon, as ocean waves have from time to time engulfed peninsulas, islands, and whole continents, depends upon the power of American educators and American officials to answer right such questions as the foregoing. The great danger is that we shall, as usual, over-emphasize lawmaking, underemphasize lawbreaking, and go to sleep during the next two or three years when we should be wide-awake and constantly active in seeing that the law is enforced. Unless exactly the same principles of law enforcement are applied in "dry districts" as we have urged for eradication of smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, and adenoids, local and city prohibition are doomed to failure. There must be:
1. Inspection to discover disease centers--"blind pigs," "blind tigers," etc.
2. Compulsory notification by parents and landlords, and by police and other officials.
3. Prompt investigation upon complaint from private citizens.
4. Prompt removal of the disease and disinfection of the center.
5. Segregation of individual units that disseminate disease, whether bartender, saloon keeper, owner of premises, or respectable wholesaler, none of whom should be permitted to shift to another the responsibility for violating liquor laws.
6. Persistent publicity as to the facts regarding enforcement and violation, so that no one, whether saloon leaguist or anti-saloon leaguist, shall be uninformed as to the current results of "dry" laws.
It is perfectly safe to assume that none of these things will be done consistently unless funds are provided to pay one or more persons in each populous locality to give their entire time to the enforcement of laws, just as the improvement of other ills of municipal government require the constant attention of trained investigators. Cogent arguments for such funds have recently appeared in the _New York Evening Post's_ symposium on "How to Give Wisely," by Mrs. Emma Garrett Boyd, of Atlanta, and Miss Salmon, of Vassar College.