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The Anti-Saloon League Proposal. The Executive Committee of the Anti-Saloon League, headed by Bishop Thomas Nicholson of Chicago and including Bishop James Cannon of Washington, D. C., and Wayne B. Wheeler, paid a business call on President Coolidge. They wanted the Cramton Bill made law. The Cramton Bill would set up the Prohibition Unit as a branch of the Treasury Department independent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. This is in accordance with the announced belief of the League that Commissioner of Internal Revenue Blair has hampered the work of Prohibition Commissioner Haynes. Moreover, the bill would remove the control of industrial alcohol from the Bureau of Internal Revenue to the Prohibition Unit. The League claims that "6,000,000 gallons of industrial alcohol was used last year to supply the illicit trade. Reduced to 40% whiskey, this provided 240,000,000 half pints of bootleg." The bill would also place the Prohibition Unit under the merit svstem. Secretary Mellon approved this bill. Its last feature, the application of civil-service rules to the Unit, is generally approved.
The drug trade and the users of industrial alcohol are most earnestly opposed to the measure. They assert that the present restrictions on the use of alcohol are very severe, but that, under the Prohibition Unit, conditions would be worse; that they would be placed at the mercy of a group of agents not gifted with an understanding of their legitimate business needs—sleuths, in fact, whose sole training has been to regard every user of alcohol as a criminal.