BACCHUS DEPLOYED

Yesterday. The Anti-Saloon League, in convention, voted to forego the undercover method of ensuring enforcement by exerting strong pressure on Government officials, a method used so effectively by the late Wayne B Wheeler. Hereafter it will make a frontal attack with publicity, educational campaigns, and an attempt to answer and condemn all "wet" literature and periodicals. This change is hardly the result of the Hearst disclosures, but springs from the general public feeling against high-handed bureaucracy. Certainly it will ease the hearts and slow the pens of many who thought the League was leagued with the Devil and the Methodist Church to controvert the rights of American citizens; but one is permitted to wonder what statistics and horrible examples will be added to the phenomena of contemporary life in a pamphlet war for the conversion and diversion of the public.

Perhaps the fear, in this case, is an empty one, but it is usually true that when a band of zealots with a cry of "Allah!" pluage with proselytizing fervor into a war for a cause, the validity of the means becomes obscured in the worth of the end. The liberties taken by anti-German historians in the war are well known, and the dubious statement is current that sixty per cent of the babies born of tobacco smoking mothers die in two years. At least, no doubt, a man drinking aldehyde will replace the policeman in the "You Can't Win" subway signs; the renegade will do his drinking down alleys in order to avoid the pointing fingers of abused wives and George Washingtons; and the public will grow very, very weary.