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After months of jockeying and no little cursing, legitimate liquormen last week sought to hold the positions they had achieved. Square in the front rank were the whiskey men—Seton Porter of National Distillers with more than 50% of all U. S. whiskey in his saddle bags; Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Distillers with about 25% and the cream of the imported liquor agencies; the Thompson family with their huge distillery at Owensboro, Ky.; Emil Schwarzhaupt who quit National Distillers to branch out for himself in Bernheim Distilling Co. and who last week shouldered forward by purchasing at government auction 24,000 cases of liquor seized on the high seas; Harry C. Hatch who had come down from Canada to build a huge distillery in Peoria, Ill. for his Hiram Walker-Gooderham & Worts; a Philadelphia gentleman by the name of Simon ("Si'') Neuman who was sure his Publicker Commercial Alcohol Co. could make 17-year-old whiskey in 24 hours. There were importers large & small, California wine growers, New York champagne men, distributors, restaurateurs, hotelmen, bootleggers. There were realtors, hairdressers and elevator boys, all wild-eyed over their ''slices" in this or that liquor syndicate. In London and Glasgow, astute liquor brokers were selling "brands ' on which the printer's ink was still wet. All was hurly-burly in the rush for retail, wholesale and importing licenses and quotas. Broken Axles. Under the eyes of a platoon of U. S. revenue agents, a caravan of 100 trucks clattered through the still streets of Philadelphia one night last week, shuttling 50,000 cases of gin across the river to Camden, N. J. Pennsylvania's Governor Pinchot was jamming through his Legislature a $2-a-gallon floor tax on every drop of liquor in his great distilling State. Next night he signed the bill, dis patched troopers to the borders. The 50,000 cases of gin belonging to a subsidiary of Publicker Commercial Alcohol Co. was about all the legal liquor that escaped be fore the tax became effective. Gin can be made in a day. Whiskey takes years. But a gallon of aged whiskey, cut with water, alcohol and flavoring, makes ten gallons of potable blended whiskey. That is how, in various degrees, U. S. distillers intend to make their present stocks of 21,000,000 gal. go around. One-third of all whiskey in the U. S. is in Pennsylvania warehouses. Four-fifths of Schenley Distillers' precious 5,000,000 gal. are there. National Distillers has 2.000,000 gal. impounded. Until they pay Governor Pinchot some $14,000,000 cash they cannot touch it. Every distillery in the State shut down tight last week. Thousands of men were summarily discharged, grain and fuel orders canceled. Distillers felt like the settler whose axle broke just before the bugle blew.