Farmers' Friend

Farmer's Friend

City dwellers with beery intent slip into shadowy doorways, knock or ring cabalistically, whisper passwords through peepholes, gratings, chained portals. Dry-voting country dwellers blithely bear in the grape and the apple, press the ripe fruit, catch the juice, hoard it away. When winter comes they have a convivial cup. Long and loudly have urbanites protested this disparity of Prohibition. Last week city men envied country men when Prohibition Commissioner James M. Doran issued to his agents this edict: "The National Prohibition act authorizes . . . unrestricted manufacture of non-intoxicating cider and fruit juice in the home. . . . Conditions: . . . 1) it shall be non-intoxicating in fact; 2) it shall be exclusively for home use . . . 3) it shall not be sold or delivered except with a vinegar permit. . . . Nor will you interfere with such manufacture and use in the home. . . ."

Smart citymen are not without benefit from the Doran order. Well they know that they can share with wine-making husbandmen the "exceptions" under Prohibition. From many a company they can buy barrels of perfectly legal grape juice which, unless an act of God is carefully averted, will ferment in the city home to make a cup no less convivial than that quaffed on the farm. Urban winemakers were quick to interpret the Doran order as an added legal protection to their enterprise.

So great an industry has become the growing of grapes that its representatives last week were in Washington, buzzing hopefully about the offices of the Federal Farm Board, seeking loans to develop co-operation between producer and consumer, to eliminate waste.