The majority of American newspapers have always been enthusiastic supporters of prohibition. It is only lately that many of them have come to the conclusion that strict prohibition laws are of no benefit to this country. The Chicago Tribune has been one of those few papers which never have catered to prohibition, which have never agreed with it; and its editorial articles have been severely critical of all self-appointed reformers and their senseless activities. Lately it has again printed an article of a nature such as has hardly ever appeared in the American press. Here are a few interesting excerpts from it:

It is reported that Russia intends to do away with prohibition, as far as it concerns beer and wine, but not, however, raising the ban on vodka, brandy, and other forms of hard liquor. Russia is one of the present or former first-class powers which have tried absolute prohibition. The United States is the second, and Turkey the third.

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Russia has received her prohibition from one autocrat and has kept it under another. Of these two, Nicholas was less bloody than Lenin. He was weaker, and perhaps more general in his murderous tendencies, because the Czarist system was more murderous in its oppression. Lenin is stronger, but absolutely without feeling, like a machine gun.

"Bone-dry Turkey has the lowest moral level of all so-called civilized countries. All her women are permitted to have are their bodies, and the murdering of defenseless subjects was being done with an almost religious zeal. All this degradation of human feelings and instincts has been taking place without the incentive, provocation, or influence of alcoholic beverages. we may not agree on the causes which made the Turks human tarantulas [sic] but we must agree that it was not drinking. In that respect they are as moral as Wayne Wheeler or W. J. Bryan.

Since we are talking about Asia, let us look at another nation which drinks hard. It is Japan. It has its sake and distilled drinks made of various 3fruits, and it has its beer. Perhaps some Japanese are too poor to indulge in drinking, but alcohol is a part of Japanese life. Japan is the greatest Asiatic nation. The Japanese have their arts, literature, and their ideals, which may not agree with ours, but they are ideals just the same. They have an incomparable industry and an exemplary devotion to duty, and have what the Turks lack, character. These are facts that everybody must admit, and the reader may draw his own conclusion.

Concerning Russia it has always been maintained that it suffered under the rule of the Czar and vodka; and vodka was prohibited by the Czar. It was said that Ivan's foggy brain started getting some vision, if such a thing was possible. Life's realities were nothing, life's pleasures naught. Vodka occasionally gave him a dream; without vodka he had not even that. When Nicholas entered the war he took some nineteen or twenty million men, and put them into concentration camps, and had weapons only for two million. Great masses of Ivans, superfluous in the war, were drowning in their own inactivity, without work, without vodka, without beer, without anything. Finally they murdered the 4Czar and accepted Lenin, and with him they dived head first into the abyss, murdering the arts and literature which Russia had had, ruining productivity, turning their fertile soil into desert, creating for themselves famine and pestilence, losing territory and ports they had gained as a nation that had been growing stronger and stronger.

We do not wish to imply that the constitutionally dry United States will go after Abdul the Damned, or Lenin the Terrible, or that the Americans are heading toward an abyss because they are not being heated up by alcohol, or at least those Americans who do not do so during constitutional prohibition. But it is only proper to speculate why two of the three nations that have refused legality to the old natural law of fermentation, have sunken to the lowest levels and are being destroyed by internal evils and external enemies. The French, this intellectually greatest nation, are drinkers of wine; the greatest Asiatics are drinkers of wine and liquors; the greatest builders of nations have been drinkers of alcoholic beverages, and the nation of the greatest artists raises wine grapes on every other plot of land up to the edge of fiery lava from Vesuvius; and the 5greatest organizers of industry and commerce, the wielders of the greatest national power, the Germans, are drinkers of beer and wine.

Other local papers have lately been writing a great deal about the question of medicinal beer and wine, and almost all of them agree that a new step has been made toward the nullification of the prohibition laws and the final return of beer and wine. Of course, nobody is serious about medicinal beer. There may be people who believe that beer may be a medicine, or at least a tonic, but there are very few of them. One paper says in this respect: "There are comparatively few people who are in agreement with the issuing of medical prescriptions for beer or wine because they believe that neither of these two beverages has any special merit as medicine. The majority of the people agree with that system because they want to drink and believe that they have the right to want to drink. And why should they not have that right? The ruling of Secretary Mellon concerning medicinal beer and wine will not dispose of this controversial question, nor can it be disposed of by the new prohibition law which has been discussed in Congress for such a long time 6and finally may be passed. Prohibition cannot last because too much property is involved and affected, and because too many people are convinced that prohibition is depriving them of certain inalienable rights. The people will go on violating the law while endeavoring to give it such interpretation as will permit them to drink what they want and remain within the law while doing so. The final outcome must be that all prohibition laws will be so adjusted as to agree with the ideas of the majority of the American people."