CHAPTER XIV CRIME AND DRUNKENNESS Promises were made by the reformers that with the advent of Prohibition the country would witness a great lessening of crime and drunkenness. Our prisons were to be almost emptied. Unemployment would be practically unheard of; and the health of the people would be infinitely better. Never has the country suffered more from strikes than during that period between 1920 and the present time. Labor is still restless, for all the sanctimonious predictions of the Anti-Saloon League. We see, then, that law and order do not come when we harness a people’s will. Would that they did! Life would be simple then. People are bound to burst their bonds and fetters now and then. The spurt of the geyser goes on, no matter how we seek to suppress it. Old Faithful performs every hour in Yellowstone Park; and I suppose that until time is no more, men will go on shouting about their rights, despite such empty reforms as Prohibition; will go on holding grievances, demanding a remedy of wrongs, and generally raising Cain. Obstreperous behavior is not the result of drunkenness--always. People are humanly fond of cavorting, even without the aid of a stimulant. And so the strikes go merrily on, and workingmen who were placid under beer are found to be thinkers under Volsteadism. The headlines in our papers continue to be sensational, in these times that were to be so quiet. Murders still occur, strangely enough; and hold-ups of the most brazen kind take place everywhere. Diamond ear-rings are snatched from ladies driving in the Park of an evening, houses are entered by ruffians who tie up the servants and the master and mistress and calmly go through the premises, taking what they wish. It is all very shocking, very terrible; but human nature has a way of remaining what it is. It was thought that only drunkards committed such heinous crimes. We find that men of sobriety are equally culpable. The millennium has not arrived; and our prisons are still densely populated, much as the reformers may deny the disconcerting fact. One is shocked at the continuance of outrageous crimes; and if, after three years of experiment with the abolishment of booze, we still face a wave of disorder and confusion, there seems little hope of that future of roses and sweetness and light so glibly prophesied. Hard times continue to confront us, though the fat pay-envelope to the wife and children of the workingman was to be a weekly event. An analysis of official figures shows an increase of 44 per cent in the arrests for drunkenness in 1921 over 1920, and Stuyvesant Fish has shown that the largest industrial life insurance company reports an increase of 50 per cent in deaths due to alcoholism in 1921, the second “dry” year. The statistical Bulletin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, April, 1922, contained these words: