The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-03-17

Down in F'lorida-Florida the en- chantedi-where the Gulf of Mexico sym bolically tries on the west to emulate the dimensions of the Atlantic ocean on the east even as the sports and swS.ls at Palm Beach try to copy the manners of the ladies and gentlemen of Miami down in Florida at the tip end of whose mystic peninsula the waters of gulf and ocean meet in unconscious embrace, just like the tourists all unknowing the domestic origins and relations each from each and one from t'other-down in Florida, the native bolsheviki are be- ginning to assert themselves, having elected as their governor a year or two ported from Alabama.
 Fad being the only wear. inevitably they turn to woman suffrage and rfo- hibition. As if the land of flowers is not arid enough under the dispensa- lions of God and nature the Trotkys and Lenines who are in the saddle wonld convert it into sand heap of dry bones and a Sahara of dead moralites, wound ing if not killing the pilgrim goose that lays each season the golden eggs, it may be of fashion, frivolity and foi.y, but also of prosperity and distinction, for, under the F'lagler system of develop ment Florida has been rapidly becoming the Riviera of America-its winter playground as Switzerland has been the summer playground of Europe-whoily to the profit of the bolsheviki, that erstwhile subsisted on shrimps and clam shells and made an uncertain living tWirling their fingers and twisting their toes and dozing on the roots of trees. It is familiar joke that when out among the Everglades you look away in the distance and see what looks like a stump, if 1t moves it is stump, but if 1t does not move it is Cracker, that being the local designation of the Florida bolsheviki.
 Florida is almost as bone dry as Maine. Georgia and Alabama. where, it yoc want a drink and are willing to drink rot-gut. you can get it by making yourself party to perjury. Yet there comes an occasional note of dissent You find for example in the Miami Her aid the following:
 sIt Is a favorite method among all legged prohibitionist papers to assert that those papers of the country that are much more interested in preserv : ins the constitution of the United States than they are in any minor re- ferns. are "booze'' papers That is such an effective argument Of course it is unanswerable to certain quality of mind, but thinking men realize that the oft repeated statement does not touch the subject in question, which Is fundamentally one of the structure of the constitution.
 '"The afternoon bolshevik paper of Miami has a way of insinuating that the Herald is one of the ''booze'' pa pers of which it has so much to say, notwithstanding the fact that the Her. aid has never supported the saloon cause, has never opposed prohibition, as such. does not receive liquor ad- vertisements, nor it might say in passing. has it ever taken money to keep silence when any of these things were under discussion, statement which the bolshevilSi cannot truthfully make.
 There is no reason to say that the papers of this country, who are stand- ing by the constitution and are ap- pealing to the people not to be "dig- ging at the foundations of the repub- lie" are influenced by the liquor in terests. and the statement is one Of these deliberate lies that the prohibit ton movement as it is now largely conducted, uses as argument"
 In another part of the same paper we read or prohibition meeting at nouveau riche place seeking by heck or crook to work it's way into the limelight of cheap publicity, where strolling player from New York un- der pay of the very rich Anti-Sa1oon league held forth to the delight of an audience of long-nosed saints and snaggle-tooth angels of the awful sin of bone-dry Dade county and the dawn of the millennium of woman suffrage, when children will be brought into the world by machinery, and there will be no such thing as sex, the male varmint nearly the equal of the female varmint if it behaves itself.
 The Herald touches this lightly It mildly suggests that s'carrying coals to Newcastle is as nothing compared to importing a lot of speakers to tell bore-dry Miami about prohibition" quite overlooking the circumstances REV THTTRCTON DRTCE