Dry Plans

The Treasury Department announced its policy for Prohibition enforcement in 1928. Last year, some 24 millions were appropriated for the Prohibition unit's work in 1927. Next year's expenses were expected to be heavier. But since its reorganization as a branch of the civil service, the Bureau is more efficient. And, decided the Bureau, were moneys not spent as in the past on buying lecturers to preach, literature to parade and statistics to prove the triumphs of Prohibition, there would be plenty to spread around on straight enforcement. The Treasury Department therefore announced that it would cease to preach, parade and prove; that it would practice only; would ask no increased appropriation for 1928.

Anti-Salooners. "The strategy we should employ today is to arouse our people and get them into the fight. Get the church people at the bat. Let them have their innings. . . . The Anti-Saloon League and the W. C. T. U. have never been and never will be supergovernment.* But we have said to the people that the time has come to take our government out of the hands of the bootleggers and put it back where it belongs." So said Superintendent Francis Scott McBride of the Anti-Saloon League last month. Last week there were rumblings among Anti-Salooners who gathered in Washington, D. C., for a caucus. They rumbled that Superintendent McBride was not "militant" enough. The League was planning to raise and spend a million per year for five years in a battle-to-the-death with 'leggers. . . .

*Ferreting into campaign funds in Pennsylvania Senator James A. Reed and his committee discovered that the W. C. T. U. had raised $250,000 for a "Governor's Enforcement Fund" after the Legislature had refused to vote money for Governor Gifford Pinchot to enforce Prohibition. The W. C. T. U. had an office in the State Capitol and paid for prosecutions brought in the name of Pennsylvania. National Anti-Saloon funds for assisting Prohibition enforcement from 1921 to 1925 were about $500,000 per annum--exclusive of millions raised by state Leagues. (TIME, July 5, 1926),