[Clipping from the Port Hume Beacon of Sunday, 13 August 1922. Sunday Feature Section, page 3. Headline three columns wide.]

PORT HUME AND THE NEW SOBRIETY

A Sunday Consideration of Our City at Two and a Half Years' Distance from the Constitutional Amendment

By Our Staff.

Two and a half years ago, on the 17th of January 1920, the eighteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States took effect in the City of Port Hume, as in the rest of our Republic. Our parlors, our saloons, and our social institutions put aside — so far as the law could require them — the customary use of spirituous liquors. Thirty months have passed. It is a reasonable moment, upon a summer Sunday, to take stock of what the great experiment has so far produced in our city.

Port Hume has acquitted itself, in the main, with the civic discipline that the moderate observer has come to expect of a Great Lakes city of our size and stability. Our principal hotels have cheerfully adapted their dining rooms; our leading social clubs have quietly retired their cellars; our citizenry has, as in so many matters of the public weal, folded the new requirement into its domestic habits without complaint.

That there have been, inevitably, small breaches of the new law — the occasional private party in a private residence in which a long-hoarded bottle has been produced, the occasional supper at one of the riverfront restaurants at which a discreet house wine has accompanied a discreet entrée — is a fact which no serious chronicler of our city will deny. Such breaches are, in the perspective of history, trivial. They are the smallish eddies that surround, in every new legal arrangement of the citizenry's habits, the broad clean current of general compliance.

There have been, to be sure, other and more concerning breaches: the occasional commercial vehicle proceeding at an unexplained hour along an unexpected route; the occasional lake freighter whose manifest (if a thoughtful citizen had access to such manifests) might bear some small examination; the occasional rumor — always without named sources and always from residents of the Heights, whose skeptical dispositions are admirable in the scholarly context but less suited to the adjudication of industrial affairs — concerning the nocturnal operations of certain firms whose daytime operations are of the most unexceptionable kind.

Such concerns, we may say without indelicacy, will arise in any port city of our size. Port Hume is no Cleveland, nor is it any Buffalo, where the peculiar pressures of a larger transit-city have given rise to the regrettable phenomena now famously associated with those places. Port Hume is a smaller city, a more settled city, a city in which our principal industrial houses have been in their positions for two and in some cases three generations, and in which the civic pride of those houses may reliably be expected to dispose them toward the law's observance.

The Harbor Police, under the long-serving Chief whose name is not necessary for us to rehearse in this column, has conducted the work of harbor enforcement with the quiet efficiency that has characterized that office for more than a decade. The City Police, likewise, has — under the leadership of the Chief whose tenure we expect to continue — kept the municipal peace in respect of the occasional minor infraction of the law without resort to the more theatrical measures which have so disfigured the press of other cities.

We cannot, in honesty, claim that every cargo that crosses our quays is of an entirely uncomplicated character; we cannot claim that every establishment in our city has, with equal rigor, observed the new constitutional provision. These are not claims a candid Sunday feature would make. We claim instead that Port Hume, in its three-year accommodation of the new law, has preserved the outward dignity of its civic life, has not suffered the kind of public violence associated with other cities, and has, upon the whole, given the law as much observance as the law has given Port Hume respect for its peculiarities.

The broad direction is encouraging. The small anomalies, where they arise, may be entrusted to the attention of the proper authorities, whose vigilance is the subject of the City's justified confidence.

The Beacon is not, in its editorial policy, an enemy of the Eighteenth Amendment; nor is it an enthusiast. It is a newspaper of record, whose responsibility is to record what its city is doing in a moment of national transition. We shall revisit this topic at five years' distance from the Amendment, in January 1925, and shall consider at that time what further remarks the accumulated evidence may warrant.

— The Editors.