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With Mr. Hoover in the White House, eminent Drys felt last week that a real groundswell of Dryness was at last in motion. Said F. Scott McBride, general superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League: "This is the greatest opportunity that Prohibition has ever had." In commemoration of the event, the U.S. Drys, Consolidated—representatives of 31 Dry organizations—massed at the White House and presented Mr. Hoover with an embossed, vellum-bound volume containing their felicitations on his good fortune, signed by their organizations and all prominent Prohibitors. As a further vote of confidence the Anti-Saloon League announced its readiness to back Mr. Hoover's desire to shift the Prohibition unit from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice. This was notable because the late, astute Wayne B. Wheeler, predecessor of F. Scott McBride, for years fought the transfer. The date of the change is as yet problematical. It will probably not take place until after the regular session of Congress beginning next December is under way— for Congress must authorize and Congress will probably have too many other things to do in the extra session. Meantime the Commission which Mr. Hoover appoints to investigate the Prohibition problem may have rendered a report. There will be opposition to the transfer, however. Already last week Dr. Harrison Estell Howe of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was protesting that the transfer would be a "menace to legitimate industry" if it put the control of industrial alcohol permits into the hands of officials whose primary business is to catch and convict criminals. ¶ The potency of Mr. Hoover's Dry leadership was shown by the wife of the Wet Governor of New York, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would never jeopardize her husband's political position but who did, last week, go so far as to say to a Y. W. C. A. meeting in Manhattan: "A woman of my acquaintance remarked that while she never had lived up to the Prohibition law, she almost believed Mr. Hoover could get her to do it." ¶ In Peoria, Ill., on the first two days of Mr. Hoover's administration, 20 persons, including two women, died from drinking poison gin. In White Plains, N. Y., on the same day, a jury awarded $7,500 damages to a Mrs. Owen Gray. The defendants, Philip Dominic and Hilda Nardecchia, alleged speakeasy owners, declared that Owen Gray had brought liquor to their restaurant, become intoxicated, tried to butt two other patrons and, missing them, butted the wall with injury to his spinal column. Mrs. Gray, suing for damages to her husband's physique, declared that her husband bought seven drinks from Defendant Nardecchia, after which he sat down at a piano and sang "The Sidewalks of New York," "An Irish Jaunting Car" and "Sweet Adeline." At the end of the third song he was, she said, set upon jointly by an Englishman and an Irishman, both angry, from which resulted his injuries. A provision of the Volstead Act makes liquor sellers responsible for such misadventures. ¶ One event was perhaps a shock to Mr. Hoover. The omniscient press recalled that Secretary of Commerce Robert Patterson Lamont was listed along with John J. Raskob, Charles H. Sabin, Pierre S. du Pont, the late Haley Fiske, Samuel Harden Church. Nicholas Brady, as one of the directors of the Association Against