The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-08-04

the liberty that enables one to get drunk and upholds the law that fines a man for getting his tank filled.
 With us this isn't a moral ques- tion. This is a practical question of every day prudence. We know that prohibition is not going to cure the body polite of all the ills that flesh is heir to. We know that prohibit tion or no prohibition there will be crooks and scoundrels. We know that there will be strikes and lock outs and we know that the sober boss will not be bit better to work for than the boss that goes to bed with a jag. We know that many and many a psalm singing employer will rob the cross of an ass if he gets half a show, and will beat the workers out of their pay if they will stand for it.
 Prohibition isn't going to abolish poverty or the results of poverty. It is not going to give work to everyone. It is not going to avert panics and provide perpetual pros perity. It's going to do none of these things.
 But it will increase sobriety. It removes the chances to become a drunkard. And in doing so it will contribute to an increase of clear brains which is the main desidera- tum in the labor movement.
 Of all the pitiful victims of the social struggle the most hapless and the most hopeless is the man who shoots dope into his veins to forget his troubles. The most hopeful and the only man who has any hope is the man that makes up his mind to agitate and to educate and to or ganize and to perpetually spread the facts as to real cause of his eX- ploitation. The men who seek com fort in a drop of liquor will not be likely to prolong the fight for better conditions. And it is for that req son the man who wont booze is the most desirable man.
 We know that the root of the evil is the profit system. The man in the saloon business is there because there is money in it. If the govern ment could deprive the business of its profit who would engage in it? But what the government is doing is to extract from the business through licenses and the rest an enormous proportion of the gains, and these costs necessarily incite the saloonist to make liquor a greater and greater attraction. He must do it to make up the various expenses of his establishment. The more trunks he makes the better he is off.
 Someone said that if you could remove the revenue from the booze and let any man make his own, you would bring about temperance among people. But just as long as you can make money manufactur- ing dipsomaniacs in society just so long will they be made.
 The main evil is then the profit system. It is for profits that men do all these things that are anti social and vicious, and we have for tha reason mighty little use for those who would let this system of economy remain and think they have removed all our woes when we have made the town dry.
 We haven't done anything of the kind. We have merely removed an obstacle that lay in the path of agi- tation and organization and that's all.
 The main trouble with prohibition and the like is that it leads many workers to believe that that is the end of the labor movement when 1t is nothing of the kind. The end of the labor movement is an industrial democracy with industrial control of the social activities by those who labor for these who labor. Every thing else is only a phantom end, leading the workers into blind al- ley unless they clearly realize that this or that. is only useful when the means to that end.
 We have no time for a prohibi- tion for the same reason that Gov ernor Carlson the labor hating