Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/231

Rh to strengthen it—nearly fifty amendments having been enacted since 1858. The law provides for an agent in each city or town who shall sell liquor for medicinal and mechanical purposes, but he by no means has a monopoly of the business.

According to the committee's report, liquor may be obtained in Portland from ordinary bars under police protection, kitchen bars, pocket peddlers, hotel bars, apothecary shops, bottling establishments, express companies, clubs, and the city liquor agency. The ordinary bars have little on the outside to betray their nature, but access is easy. "In the score or so of saloons of this class visited by the writer," says Mr. Koren, "from six to twenty persons were found who were there to drink, most of them young men, some of them boys between twelve and sixteen years of age. Occasionally small girls would come in to have ‘growlers’ filled. Sometimes older girls appeared, to drink and to talk with the men. The customers lounged about, smoking and drinking, with an apparent sense of freedom and security."

Mr. Koren estimated the number of kitchen bars in the city at the time of his investigation at about eighty. They are found in the poorer quarters, and rely more on concealment than on protection. They do most business on Saturday evenings and Sundays, and sell little but distilled liquor. The drinking at these bars is especially productive of intoxication, both because of the quality of the liquor sold and of the opportunity of uninterrupted indulgence.

"The pocket peddlers multiply with amazing rapidity during a period of strict enforcement, and most of them disappear as suddenly in ‘wet times.’ At the time of the present investigation not a few were found on the wharves and along the water front after dark, especially on Sundays. They supply ‘split’ at the rate of thirty cents a pint for the cheapest grade. Boys of fifteen and upward were found as venders of ‘split.’ The pocket peddler secures many victims on incoming fishing vessels and coasting schooners, which he boards at the first opportunity." "Split," Mr. Koren explains, consists of the cheapest kind of alcohol—sometimes wood alcohol—mixed with water, with a dash of rum for flavor, and some coloring matter. It produces a violent and dangerous form of intoxication.

At least five of the principal hotels sell liquor at bars. Protection costs them in the neighborhood of one hundred dollars a month, and they are occasionally raided. Beer is sold in large quantities at certain oyster houses.

From the number of the drug stores in Portland, one to each eight hundred inhabitants, and the location of many of them, it is evident that they can not all exist for the sale of drugs. When this