GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The insidious effort to dry up America has now taken the form of "boring from within", so familiar to political parties. The Salvation Army has set out to convert bootleggers. The report is brief, and one is left in the delicious uncertainty as to whether the Salvation Army is going to make Christians or prohibitionists out of the bootleggers.

The weight of the evidence, however, is against an attempt to make prohibitionists of them. If the anti-Saloon League is to be believed, all of them would have died long ago if they had sampled their own wares. Furthermore, bootleggers are already earnest advocates of prohibition; because their whole trade is dependent on a federal enforcement which is neither too strict nor too lenient.

If, as seems more probable, bootleggers are to be converted to Christianity, the movement deserves the hearty support of the entire country. Who does not pity the rum runner, tossing in his ship upon the fretful sea and longing for a Bible to solace his lonely hours? And what of the house-to-house pedlar, is he to have no bundle of holy trac's to protect his vitals from the bullets of the revenue officers? These men deserve all the pity they can get, for they are strangers in their native land, pursued relentlessly, and now and then successfully, by the minions of the law.

The Salvation Army training school needs missionaries of a stern type, for the job is admittedly difficult. Men with an understanding of the hardships of the bootlegger, and possessing the necessary courage to carry the gospel to dangerous places, should apply at once to the New York office