AN OUTSPOKEN PROHIBITIONIST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3867, 6 November 1928, Page 4

AN OUTSPOKEN PROHIBITIONIST.

MAYOR OF PHILADELPHIA’S DIFFICULTY. Mayor Mackay, according to the Philadephia “Bulletin” of April 13, 1928, challenged President Coolidge, Congress, and all Federal authorities of the district of Columbia to' “dry up” Washington and make it an example of prohibition enforcement to the rest of the nation. Mayor Mackay said: Why does not the President and the Congress give the rest of the nation a real example in the enforcement of the dry laws if prohibition is enforceable? My stand has been taken, and everybody knows what it is.” Mr. Mackay said: “I have given Director Davis his instructions. From now on the entire matter of police activity lies in the Department’s hands.” Dealing with speakeasies and the people who patronise them, Mayor Mackay said this: — “I have always been a prohibitionist, and I want the policy of prohibition to triumph, and I am anxious to enforce the law to the utmost. To make Philadelphia dry—something that cannot in fact be done” —he said, “I am caught between the) upper and lower layers in connection with prohibition. I mean the people who say in public tliatj the speakeasies of this city should be closed, and who are the people in private who patronise these speakeasies. “When I became Mayor of this city I was left with 13,000 speakeasies on my door step by the previous administration. I say, and I say emphatically, that to make the city dry it would be necessary to double the police force, double the number of judges, increase the District Attorney’s Offi.ee, and build and maintain additional prisons. Doubling the police force would cost over 7 million dollars more a year to collect from taxpayers, and altogether complete enforcement measurements would call for a round ten million dollars extra in city costs. “It is time,” concluded Mayor Mackay, “that the public itself faced the facts. Are citizens willing to pay higher taxation in an effort to enforce prohibition?” Buell is the state of affairs in the city of Philadelphia, where even the Mayor, himself a prohibitionist, is unable to cope with the evils, corruption and social degradation which prohibition has produced. — Advt. 9.