COUNTING THE COST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2956, 31 October 1925, Page 3

COUNTING THE COST.

a lawless business. CORRUPTION RAMPANT. By HENRY BOURNE JOY,) Director Packard Car Co., and formerly Director Federal Reserve Bank at Chicago. “The almost countless millions of dollars which have been appropriated and spent in five years to aceomplish the enforcement of bone dry Prohibition have failed in that accomplishment. Not only has this country failed, as naturally must be the case, to make itself bone dry at the. vast cost of the appropriations for the dry armies and dry navies, but also it has been foregoing durihcr that period a revenue which it mfght readily have in its national treasury of approximately five hun

tired millions of dollars per annum, excise tax, and an amount of money approximating that sum has been going to the purveyors of alcoholic beverages whom some people call boot-leggers and others call merchant princes. “Our courts are consigning to jail, to associate with thugs, murderers, burglars and every sort of villain, a large number of decent young men who have taken a chance of making easy money by purveying liquor across the borders. Men''have always taken such risks for easy money. Men always will take such risks for easy money. They are not cheating our customs nor defrauding the Government of revenue, because there is no duty on the goods imported. They take the risk for the easy money. Again human nature prevails.

“It is perfectly safe to state today that this country cannot survive with half of its people hying to put the other half of its population in the penitentiaries of our country for following the natural dictates of human instincts.”— “The North American Review,” 1925. . . A law which makes criminals of people who are not criminals, and which would 'transform this country into a kind of penal settlement is not a tit law for New Zealand. _i. dvt 13 ‘