The Daily Alaska empire., 1930-02-08
The Wickersham Report,
CNew York WorldO

The preliminary report of the Wickersham Com mission which the President submitted yesterday to Congress is a modest, one might almost say, all apologetic document In tone it is exactly WhaV me might expect from a group of able and mgh- minded men, confronted with an almost impossible
 task and pushed by political pressure into announc ing conclusions before they were ready to reach conclusions The document itself really consists Of la preliminary explanation as to why the recon mendations in it are wholly incommensurate with the size and complexity of the Prohibition problem, and then with able presentation of four con- cusons all of which announced by the Pres- dent more than a month ago. and have been under public discussion for years.
 An examination of the nature of these conclu- sions will show believe, how very small a part of the problem the Commission has as yet tried to deal with The report states that in the last year upward of 80000 persons from every part Of cont- mental United States, were arrested for Prohibition offenses It points out that for purposes of en- forecent it is necessary to police frontier 18,700 miles long including the Canadian border, on which there are at least thousand roads which smugglerS can use and the Mexican border, which can be crossed almost anywhere along it's 1744 miles. For some reason or other, in mentioning the size of the problem the Commission omits to mention entirely the domestic supply of alcohol got from manufac- turers and from local stills and breweries But 1t does point out that for dealing with the whole problem of detecting violations, of investigating cases, of preparing charges and organizing the evil dence there are available perhaps 250O officials in three different Federal services. Except to recom mend a concentration of the Investigating author ity in the Department of Justice, the Commission makes no recommendation for creating a Federal force for detection and investigation which shall be in any way nearer to the size and scope of the problem than it is today.
 Thus the Commission, having recognized that the attitude of the public toward the law is funda mental factor in the whole problem, have recog- nized the inadequacy of existing Federal agencies for investigation and prosecution, makes recom- mendaton whatever either of these fundamental points The real proposal it makes has to do with relieving the Federal courts of the intoerabe congestion produced by the attempt to prosecute those cases which our wholly inadequate enforce ment machinery manages to bring before the courts The situation which the Commission has taken hold Iof is where the Federal courts find themselves swamped by those relatively few cases which an admittedly inadequate and inefficient Federal Prohibition bureaucracy tries to prosecute.
 The actual remedies proposed for relieving this congestion shall not discuss here. There grave questions of constitutonaity and of national policy involved which judges and lawyers must speak in the first instance But it may be pointed out that the practical object at which the Wicker sham report aims is not to find the truth about the enforceability of Prohibition, and not to in crease enforcement of Prohibition but to the Federal from the consequences of that little Prohibition enforcement have.