Joseph Cook said in one of his Boston lectures: "Whenever the
temperance cause has attempted to fly with one wing, whether moral
suasion or legal suasion, its course has been a spiral one. It will
never accomplish its mission in this world, until it strikes the air
with equal vans, each wing keeping time with the other, both together
winnowing the earth of the tempter and the tempted."
I congratulate the friends of temperance upon the progress both wings
have made since the beginning of their flight.
The first temperance pledge we have any record of ran thus: "I
solemnly promise upon my word of honor I will abstain from everything
that will intoxicate, except at public dinners, on public holidays and
other important occasions." The first prohibitory law was a local law
in a village on Long Island and ran thus: "Any man engaged in the sale
of intoxicating liquors, who sells more than one quart of rum, whiskey
or brandy to four boys at one time shall be fined one dollar and two
pence."
A sideboard without brandy or rum was an exception, while the jug was
imperative at every log-raising and in the harvest field. It was said
of even a Puritan community,
"Their only wish and only prayer,
In the present world or world to come,
Is a string of Eels and a jug of rum."
When Doctor Leonard Bacon was installed pastor of the First
Congregational Church in New Haven, Conn., in 1825, free drinks were
ordered at the bar of the hotel, for all visiting members, to be paid
for by the church. Today all protestant churches declare against the
drink habit and the drink sale. Pulpits are thundering away against
the saloon. Children are studying the effects of alcohol upon the
human system in nearly every state in the Union. Train loads of
literature are pouring into the homes of the people. A mighty army of
as godly women as ever espoused a cause is battling for the home,
against the saloon. The business world is demanding total-abstainers,
and fifty millions of people in the United States are living under
prohibitory laws.
Not only in this but in every civilized land the cause of temperance
is growing. Recently in France it was found there were more deaths
than births, which meant France was dying. A commission was appointed
to look into the causes. When the report was made, alcohol headed the
list. Now by order of the government linen posters are put up in
public buildings, and on these in blood red letters are these
warnings: "Alcohol dangerous; alcohol chronic poison; alcohol leads to
the following diseases; alcohol is the enemy of labor; alcohol
disrupts the home!"
Who would have thought an Emperor of Germany would ever "go back" on
beer? Emperor William in an address to the sailors recommended
total-abstinence and forbid under penalty the giving of liquor to
soldiers in the world's greatest war. The Czar of Russia has put an
end to the government's connection with the manufacture of
intoxicating liquors, and our Secretary of the Navy has banished it
from the ships and navy yards. The New York Sun says: "The business
world is getting to be one great temperance league." For many years it
was confined to the realm of morals, but today it is recognized as a
great economic question and the business world is joining the church
world in solving the liquor problem.
While the temperance cause has been going up in character, the drink
has been going down in quality. The old time distiller used to select
his site along some crystal stream, that had its fountain-head in the
mountains and ran over beds of limestone. With sound grain and pure
water, he made several hundred barrels of whiskey a year, and after
five to ten years of ripening, it was sent out with the makers' brand
upon it. Now the North American of Philadelphia, one of our leading
dailies says, rectifiers (and I would prefix one letter and make it
w-r-e-c-k-t-i-f-i-e-r-s) take one barrel from the distillery and by a
pernicious, poisonous process, make one hundred barrels from one
barrel.
It is true the sting of the adder and the bite of the serpent were in
the old-time whiskey, but it was as pure as it could be made. Doctor
Wiley, Ex-Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry, says: "Eighty-five per
cent. of all the whiskey sold in the saloons, hotels and club-rooms is
not whiskey at all but a cheap base imitation." In the different
concoctions made are found aconite, acquiamonia, angelica root,
arsenic, alum, benzine, belladonna, beet-root juice, bitter almond,
coculus-indicus, sulphuric acid, prussic acid, wood alcohol, boot
soles and tobacco stems. No wonder we have more murders in this
republic than in any civilized land beneath the sky in proportion to
population.
Along with this adulteration of the drink has gone the degeneracy of
the saloon and the seller. The day was when officers in churches could
sell liquor and retain their membership. Today the saloonkeeper is
barred from the protestant churches, barred from Masons, Odd Fellows,
Knights of Pythias, Red Men, Woodmen, Maccabees and nearly every other
fraternal organization of the world.
The saloon itself has become such a vicious resort, that when the
police look for a murderer they go to the saloon. When any vile
character is sought for, the saloon is searched. When anarchists meet
to plan for a Hay-market murder in Chicago, they meet in the saloon.
When an assassin plans to shoot down our President at an exposition,
he goes from the saloon. When a fire breaks out in Chicago or Boston
the first order is, close the saloons. Don't close any other business
house, but close the saloon. If a mob threatens Pittsburg, Cincinnati,
or Atlanta, close the saloons. If an earthquake strikes San Francisco,
close the saloons. In our large cities gambling rooms are attached to
the saloons with wine rooms above for women, and while our boys are
being ruined downstairs, girls are destroyed upstairs.
There are many thousands of women in painted shame, who would now be
safe inside life's Eden of purity but for the saloon. The South Side
Club of Chicago said in 1914: "The back rooms of four hundred and
forty-five saloons on only three streets of this city contribute to
the delinquency of fourteen thousand girls every twenty-four hours."
Is it any wonder the saloons hide behind green blinds or stained glass
windows?
There is a fish in the sea known as the "Devil Fish." It lies on its
back with open mouth and covers itself with sea moss. Over its open
mouth is a bait. When an unsuspecting fish nibbles at the bait, with a
quick snap it is caught and devoured. Do you see any analogy between
this fish and a certain business that hides itself behind painted
windows or green blinds and hangs out a bait of "free lunch" or
"Turtle Soup"? A fish that sets a trap for its kind is called a "Devil
Fish;" a business that does the like is recognized as a legitimate
trade and permitted for the sake of revenue.
Every other recognized business has improved in quality with the
years. The saloon has grown worse and worse, until it is bad and only
bad; bad in the beginning, bad in the middle, bad in the end, bad
inside, outside, upside, downside. It is so bad, the liquor dealers
are the only business men who are ashamed to put on exhibition their
finished products. In great expositions other trades present finished
wares. They do not display the tools used in making what they present
for exhibition but the finished goods. Not so with the liquor dealers;
they put on exhibition the tools with which they work, but not a
single specimen of the finished product of their trade do they present
for inspection.
"That's a fine fit of clothes you have, sir." "Yes," says the tailor,
"I put up that job; glad you like my work."
"That's a fine building across the way." "Yes," says the architect,
"that's my job and I am quite proud of it."
"That's a handsome bonnet you wear, madam." "Yes," says the milliner,
"that's my creation of style and I am rather proud of my work."
Yonder is a man intoxicated. He staggers and falls; his head strikes
the curb-stone; the blood besmears his face; the police lift him up
and start with him to the station house. Did you hear a saloon keeper
say: "That's my creation; I put up that job and I'm proud of my work."
Some one said recently in defense of the business: "The saloon keeper
deserves more consideration." This writer should know that
consideration has been the source of its undoing. Lord Chesterfield
considered it and said: "Drink sellers are artists in human
slaughter." Senator Morrill, of Maine, considered and pronounced it
"the gigantic crime of all crimes." Senator Long, of Massachusetts
considered it and called it "the dynamite of modern civilization."
Henry W. Grady, our brilliant southerner, considered it and said: "It
is the destroyer of men, the terror of women and the shadow on the
face of childhood. It has dug more graves and sent more souls to
judgment than all the pestilences since Egypt's plague, or all the
wars since Joshua stood before the walls of Jericho." The New York
Tribune considered it and said: "It's the clog upon the wheels of
American progress." The Bible considered it and compares its influence
to the bite of serpents, the sting of adders, the poison of asps, and
heaps the woes of God's will upon it.
Sam Jones said: "When the Bible says _woe_, you better stop," and as
certain as seed time brings harvest it will stop, not because of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, or the Anti-Saloon League, or the
Prohibition Party, but because afar back in the blue haze of the past
the seed of prohibition was planted in the soil of Divine truth.
Ever since God declared woe against the evils of mankind, the
batteries of the holy Bible have been trained upon the "wine that
gives its color in the cup," and the man who "giveth his neighbor
drink and maketh him drunken also."
It _will_ stop, because error cannot stand agitation. Whoever espouses
the cause of error must evade facts, falsify figures, libel logic,
tangle his tongue or pen with contradictions and wind up in confusion.
The able editor of the Courier Journal of Kentucky came to the defense
of this error, and with all his brilliancy and culture, he resorted to
personal abuse of temperance workers, _because he could not occupy a
higher plane in defense of the saloon_. He made up what he called an
"ominum gatherum," of "bigots," "hay-seed politicians," "fake
philosophers," "cranks," "scamps," "professional sharps," "mad caps of
destruction," "preachers who would sell corner lots in heaven," "a
riff-raff of moral idiots and red-nosed angels."
I could hardly believe my own eyes when I read this frantic phillipic
from one I had esteemed so highly for his intellect; one whose element
is up where eagles soar, and not down where baser birds feast upon
rotten spots in a world of beauty. Only a few days before I had read
his beautiful tribute to Lincoln, delivered at the unveiling in
Hodgenville, in which he said of the great emancipator: "He never lost
his balance or tore a passion to tatters," yet the finished orator who
paid the tribute, when he espouses the cause of error, flies into a
paroxysm of passion and tears the dignity of his own self-control into
shreds.
Knowing as I do the culture, refinement and polished manners of the
great journalist, I wondered what aggravating force could have so
unbalanced his mental scales and led him to so bitterly denounce
those, whose only offense is, trying to do what Lincoln did, abolish
an evil. If this resourceful writer were only converted to the truth
on this question, what an "ominum gatherum" he could make from the
work of the saloon curse.
The clergymen, called "canting, diabolical preachers," deserve more
respectful consideration from one who well knows their sincerity. They
are men of brains, heart and conscience; men who believe that
righteousness rather than revenue exalts a nation, and that sin, no
matter how much money invested in it, is a reproach to any people.
These ministers believe it to be morally wrong to convert God's golden
grain into what debases mankind. They preach that what is morally
wrong can never be made politically right. With them it is a matter of
deep, permanent conviction. Such attacks are made to divert attention
from the accused at the bar of public opinion.
It is the saloon that is on trial, not cranks, or moral idiots, or
ministers. The saloon is charged with being the enemy of every virtue
and ally of every vice, that it injures public health, public peace
and public morals. The Supreme Court says: "No legislature has the
right to barter away public health, public peace or the public morals;
the people themselves cannot do so, much less their servants."
In face of this declaration of the Supreme Court, legislators do
barter away public health, public peace and public morals to the
organized liquor traffic. All along the cruel career of this enemy of
peace, health and morals, it has been pampered and petted by
politicians who have been as much charmed by its promise of votes, as
was Eve in the Garden of Eden by the serpent's assurance. Deceived by
the serpent of the still, they have not only disregarded the decision
of the Supreme Court but defied God's plan of dealing with sin. They
have persisted in trying to regulate an irregularity in morals by
licensing the greatest sin of the century, and have done so to their
shame and failure in any regulation effort ever made. The only way to
cure chills is to kill the malaria. The only way to cure the cursed
liquor traffic is to cast it out of our civilization by a universal,
everlasting prohibition of the manufacture, importation and sale of
intoxicating liquor.
Rev. Howard Crosby, of New York, in advocating high license as a means
of reducing the number of saloons, said in an address: "Suppose a
tiger were to get loose in the city, would you not confine him to a
few blocks rather than let him roam the city at large?" Some one in
the audience answered aloud: "No Doctor, we would kill the tiger."
How does regulation regulate? Take the city of Louisville, Ky., where
I resided a number of years, and where I observed the practical
working of the license system. Go there any Monday morning and you
will see from twenty to forty men and women in the cage next to the
Police Court room. A marshal stands at the door of the cage and takes
them out one at a time. You will hear the judge say: "ten dollars and
cost," which means thirty days in the workhouse. Forty days pass and
here is the same man in the Police Court: thirty days to serve his
time, ten days to get a little money and then another drunk. Some do
not know how many times they have been before the court. I was there
one day when an Irishman was arraigned. The Judge said: "Pat, how many
times have you been before this court?"
"Faith, and your books will tell ye," replied the Irishman. Judge
Price, the police judge at the time, said to me: "There are a number
of men, and several women I know in this city, who pass through the
courtroom on their way to the workhouse so regularly, I can guess
within a few days of the time they will appear." They pass like
buckets at a fire, going up full and returning empty.
There is an asylum in this country where, I am told, they test a man's
insanity in this way. They have a trough which holds one hundred
gallons of water. Above is an open tap through which the water pours
constantly, and of course the trough keeps on running over. The
patient is brought to the trough, given a bucket and told to dip out
the water. If he dips all day and has not mind enough to turn off the
tap, he is considered a very serious case. If this test were put to
our license lawmakers, I fear they would have to go to the incurable
ward. They have for many years been picking up drunkards from the
gutters and opening taps for them to keep on pouring into the streets.
Under this system the saloon keepers are playing ten-pins. You know in
playing ten-pins there is a long alley, at one end of which stand the
pins, while at the other stands the player with a ball in his hand. He
rolls the ball down the alley and knocks down the pins. Some one sets
them up, and to that some one, who is often a boy, the player will
toss a dime and say: "set them up quick." Does he let them stand? No!
he rolls the ball down the alley and down go the pins. The saloon
keeper has the ball of law in his hands. No matter whether a high or
low license ball, he paid the price for the use of the ball. When
temperance workers set up drunkards and they get a little money in
their pockets away goes the ball and they are down again. When a
church revival picks up a few drunkards the saloon keeper will say:
"Here's a dollar to help in your meeting." Then in his mind he says:
"Set up the drunkards who are out of employment and money, get them
positions, and when they can earn money again, again I'll bowl them
down." Under the license system the saloon is playing ten-pins with
temperance associations, ten-pins with the church and ten-pins with
society. I have faith to believe the time is drawing near when the
balls will be confiscated and the pins can stand when we do set them
up.
I know many have not this faith because they believe prohibitory laws
are failures. They base their belief on the violation of the law. By
that rule everything is a failure. Married life is a failure; its laws
are grossly violated. Home life is a failure; there are many miserable
homes. The school is a failure; many a father has put thousands of
dollars into the education of his son and found it wasted in riotous
living. The church is a failure; many of its members are Christians
only in name and not a few are hypocrites. But we know by the loyal,
loving husbands and wives of every community that married life is not
a failure. We know by the happy homes about us, with sweetest of
household ties binding the family circle, that home life is not a
failure. We know by the education that has refined our civilization,
that the school is not a failure. We know by the redeemed of earth and
saved in heaven the church is not a failure, and we are convinced by
the organized opposition to prohibitory laws by distillers, brewers,
saloon keepers, gamblers and harlots that prohibition is not a
failure.
If prohibition is a failure in Kansas as license advocates charge,
then governors, ex-governors, attorney generals, jailers, mayors and
judges of Kansas are falsifiers. If prohibition is a failure in Kansas
why has the state grown to be the richest per capita in the Union, why
are so many jails empty, so many counties without a pauper and why,
according to the brewers' year book of 1910, was the consumption of
liquor in Kansas one dollar and sixty cent per capita and in a
neighbor license state twenty-two dollars per capita?
Along with the absurd statement that prohibition is a failure, comes
the warning of the president of the Model License League to the
business men of the country, that unless the tide of prohibition is
arrested it will "kill our cities." "Blessed are the dead that die in
the Lord."
In a local option contest a prominent business man said to me: "I do
not use liquor but I am in doubt about how I should vote on the
question." When I asked; "What's your trouble?" he answered: "We have
six saloons in this little city and the license fee is one thousand
dollars; how are we to run the city without the six thousand dollars?"
When I informed him that the six saloons took from the people eighty
thousand dollars a year, he agreed it was a reasonable estimate. I
said: "Don't you know those who spend their money for drink, if they
did not spend it over the saloon bars, would spend it over the
counters of merchants who sell clothing, food, fuel and furniture?" If
you merchants could take in eighty thousand dollars, couldn't you pay
out six thousand and not get hurt? If you can't see that you are no
better business man than was Horace Greeley a farmer. He purchased a
pig for one dollar, kept it two years, fed it forty dollars worth of
corn and sold it for nine dollars. He said: "I lost money on the corn
but made money on the hog." So, many business men see the revenue from
the license fee but can't see the cost.
Suppose on one side of a street the business houses are all bad, in
that they consume money and give worse than nothing in return; and on
the other side they are all good, in that they give an honest
equivalent for the money they receive; can't you see if the bad side
is closed, the money that went to the bad side goes to the good, and
can you not see only good can come of such a change?
There are three things prohibition of the saloon does that are
illustrated by the story told of an Irishman who said: "I did three
good things today."
"What did you do, Pat?"
"I saw a woman crying in front of a cathedral. She had a baby in her
arms, and I said: 'Madam, what are you crying about?'
"She said: 'I had two dollars in me handkerchief and came to have me
baby christened but I lost the money.'
"I said: 'Don't cry, Madam, here is a ten dollar bill; go get the baby
christened and bring me the change.' She went, and soon after returned
and handed me eight silver dollars."
"Well," said the friend, "I don't see any three good things in that."
"Ye don't! Didn't I dry the woman's tears, didn't I save the baby's
soul, and didn't I get rid of a ten dollar counterfeit bill and get
eight good silver dollars in return?"
That is what prohibition of the saloon does for a community. It dries
woman's tears, saves human souls, gets rid of a counterfeit business
and puts good business instead.
Is it a counterfeit business? It has been well said, "Go into the
butcher stall and you get meat for money, into the shoe store and you
get shoes for money, but go into the saloon and the bargain is all on
one side. It's bar-gain on one side and bar-loss on the other;
ill-gotten gains on one side, mis-spent wages on the other, a mess of
pottage on one side and the birthright of some mother's boy on the
other."
A great wail is going up from the advocates of the liquor traffic that
statewide prohibition means the destruction of immense vested
interests and dire results will follow.
"This our craft is in danger," has ever been the cry against reforms
or changes in civilization since the "Shrine Makers of Ephesus."
When slavery was abolished it was said: "This means ruin to the South!
Such a confiscation of property, with every slave set free to beg at
the white man's gate, crushes every vestige of hope, and five hundred
years will not bring relief." Only fifty years have passed and the
South is richer than ever in her history.
Justice Grier of the Supreme Court said: "If loss of revenue should
accrue to the United States from a diminished consumption of ardent
spirits, she will be the gainer a thousandfold in health, wealth and
happiness of the people."
If this is true, then this question is not only a great moral question
but also a tremendous economic problem.
If production should be for use and not for abuse, the existence of
breweries and distilleries are without excuse.
If one should be rewarded on the basis of service, the saloon keeper
has no claim for even tolerance, much less reward.
If labor is the basis of value, men who live by selling liquor to
their fellowmen are leaches on the body politic, and Ishmaels in the
commercial world.
The claim that the liquor business is a benefit to a community or to
the country is in harmony with the assertion that war is a "biological
necessity" and a "stimulating source of development."
General Sherman said: "War is hell." Certainly the one now raging
between the leading nations of the old world is a hell of carnage. And
yet intemperance has destroyed more lives than all the wars of the
world since time began. It has added to the death of the body the
eternal death of the soul and then the sum of its ravages is not
complete until is added more broken hearts, more blasted hopes,
desolate homes, more misery and shame than from any source of evil in
the world. If what Sherman said of war is true, and the liquor curse
is worse than war, how can this government hope to escape punishment
for raising revenue from a business so abominable and wicked?
A heathen emperor when appealed to for a tax on opium as a source of
revenue said: "I will not consent to raise the revenue of my country
upon the vices of its people." Yet this Christian republic, claiming
the noblest civilization of the earth, is found turning the dogs of
appetite and avarice loose upon the home life of the republic that
gold may clink in its treasury. The politician's excuse for this
compromise with earth's greatest destroyer is, it can never be
prohibited and therefore regulation and revenue is the best policy.
I can well remember when the same was said of slavery. With billions
of dollars invested in slaves, with a united South behind it and the
North divided, it could never be abolished. At that time the prospect
for the overthrow of slavery was far less than the prospect of
national prohibition today. I own I was among those who said "slavery
cannot be destroyed." Now I am one of the reconstructed. I'm like the
pig I used to read of, "When I lived I lived in clover, and when I
died I died all over."
During the Civil War Union soldiers arrested several of my neighbors
and took them to a northern prison. My southern blood was aroused. I
said: "Let a Yankee soldier come to take me and he will never take
another Kentuckian." Then my mother was alarmed. She knew how brave
her boy was. A few days later I met a squad of Yankee cavalry on the
road near our home. They said "Halt!" and I halted. They said
"Surrender!" I did so, and mother did not hear of any blood being
shed.
Again a half-drunk Union soldier rode up to our gate and said: "Who
lives here?" When I answered, he asked: "Can your mother get supper
for fourteen soldiers in thirty minutes?" "No, sir, she cannot," I
replied. Drawing a pistol, the mouth of which looked like a cannon's
mouth to me, he said: "Maybe you have changed your mind." I had, and
that supper was ready with several minutes to spare. We can, and we
_will_ stop the liquor business. I am amazed, however, to find so many
intelligent men of the North advocating the same policy on this liquor
problem the South adopted on the slavery question, which cost her so
severely. I find the same effect revenue in slaves had upon the
consciences of the tax-payers of the South, high-license revenue from
saloons is having upon the consciences of tax-payers in the North.
In the early days of slavery, when wealth in the institution was very
limited, the conscience of the South was against slavery. Old
Virginia, when a colony, appealed to King George to remove the
threatening danger from her borders. It was the voice of a General Lee
of Virginia that was lifted against slavery in the House of Burgesses.
But with the passing of time slaves grew in value, until a slave in
the South reached about the price of a saloon license now in the
North. Then the conscience of the South quieted and slavery was
justified by press, politics and pulpit. There is a remarkable analogy
between the effect of a thousand dollar slave upon the conscience of
South Carolina and a thousand dollar saloon upon the conscience of
Massachusetts. The South paid the penalty of her mistaken policy; the
North will reap its reward in retribution, if it persists in making
the price of a saloon in the North the same as the price of a slave in
the South. When the value of a world is profitless compared with the
worth of a soul then even if every saloon were a Klondyke of gold this
republic could not afford to legalize the liquor business for revenue.
I believe my northern friends will permit me to press home a little
further the lesson of southern slavery. The phase I would impress is
that any question that has a great moral principle involved is never
settled until it is settled right. We tried to regulate slavery but it
wouldn't regulate. First it was decided that the importation of slaves
should cease in twenty years. Did that settle it? Next came the
Missouri compromise, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther."
Politicians said: "Now it's settled." But a fanatic in Boston name
Garrison said: "It is not settled." Daniel Webster, as intellectual as
some of our high license advocates of today said to Lloyd Garrison:
"Stop the agitation of this question or you will bring trouble on the
country; the compromise is made and the question is settled." Lloyd
Garrison replied: "I don't care what compromise you've made; you may
pull down my office, pitch my type into the sea, and hound me through
the streets of Boston, but you will never settle the slavery question
until you settle it right."
It kept breaking out despite all legislative restrictions. At last
Columbia with one hand on her head, and the other on her heart, began
to reel on her throne, and Abraham Lincoln seized his pen and signed
the proclamation, "Universal Emancipation." Then the whole world said:
"It's forever settled." So the liquor question will be settled as was
the slavery question, by the universal, everlasting abolition of the
manufacture, sale and importation of intoxicating liquor in this
country.
High license is another Missouri Compromise. If you have the drink
you'll have the drunkenness. If you have the cause you will have the
effect. If you have the positive you will have the superlative:
Positive drink, comparative drinking, superlative drunkenness. You may
try high-tax and low-tax but all the time you will have sin-tax and
more sin than tax.
You do not change the nature of the drink by the price of a license,
the kind of a place in which it is sold or the character of the man
who sells it. Put a pig in a parlor; feed him on the best the marflet
affords, give him a feather bed in which to sleep, keep him there till
he's grown and he'll be a hog. You don't change the nature of the pig
by the elegant surroundings; you may change the condition of the
parlor.
There is but one solution of the liquor problem and that is a
nation-wide prohibitory law and behind the law a political power in
sympathy with the law and pledged to its enforcement.
Many admit the principle is correct but insist we should wait until
public sentiment is powerful enough to enforce the law. If grand ideas
had waited for public sentiment Moses would never have given the
commandments to the world. If grand ideas had waited for public
sentiment, we would still be back in the realm of the dark ages,
instead of in the light of our present civilization; back in the dim
twilight of the tallow-dip instead of the brightness of the electric
light; back with the ox team instead of the speed of the steam engine,
automobile and aeroplane; and on the temperance question back to where
a liquor dealer could advertise his business on gravestones. On a tomb
in England are these words:
"Here lies below in hope of Zion,
The landlord of the Golden Lion,
His son keeps up the business still,
Obedient to his country's will."
Years ago a friend said to me: "I admire your zeal, but I wonder at
your faith when you are in such a miserable minority." My reply was:
"Are minorities always wrong or hopeless? How would you have enjoyed
being with the majority at the time of the flood? It seems to me you
would have been safer with Noah in the ark."
As to license and prohibition, that has always been the question since
man was created. It was the question in the Garden of Eden when the
devil stood for license, "go eat," and God stood for prohibition,
"thou shalt not." That is the question today and I am quite sure God
and the devil stand now as then, and while the Adams are divided, the
Eves are nearly all on one side.
Another said: "After all the work done for temperance the people drink
as much or more than ever." My answer is: how much more would they
drink if we had not done what has been done?
Yonder on the ocean a vessel springs a leak and soon the water stands
thirty inches deep in the hold. The captain says: "To the pumps!" and
the sailors leap to their places. At the end of one hour the captain
measures and says: "Thirty inches; you are holding it down." Hour
after hour the pumping goes on, with changing hands at the pumps, and
hour after hour the captain says: "You are doing well; she can't go
down at thirty inches. Hold it there and we'll make the harbor."
Twenty hours and the captain shouts: "Thirty inches; and land is in
sight. Pump on, my boys, you'll save the ship." Suppose one of our
croakers who says, "Prohibition won't prohibit," had been on board. He
would have said: "Don't you see you are doing no good; there's just as
much water as when you began." What would have become of the ship?
At the close of the Civil War intemperance was pouring in upon the
Ship of State. Men returned from war enthralled in chains worse than
African slavery, for rum slavery means ruin to body and soul. Men,
women and children ran to the pumps, and thank God, state after state
is going dry. Soon we'll see the land of promise, and the Ship of
State will be saved from a leak as dangerous as ever sprung in a
vessel, and from as cruel a crew of buccaneers as ever scuttled a
ship.
When I began the work as a "Good Templar" forty years ago, Kentucky
was soaked in rum. Bourbon county, where I was reared, had
twenty-three distilleries, and a dead wall lifted itself against my
hopes of ever seeing the sky clear of distillery smoke above old
Bourbon county, a name on more barrels and bottles, on more bar-room
windows, and on the memories of more drunkards in ruin than any other
county in the world. Yet I have lived to see the last distillery fire
go out, and Bourbon county dry. While I had faith in the ultimate
triumph of the Cause I never dreamt it would come to Bourbon county in
my lifetime.
When I began saloons were at almost every crossroads village, and the
bottle on sideboards was the rule in thousands of leading homes. Time
and again my life was threatened. On one occasion twelve armed men
guarded me from a mob, and once my wife placed herself between my body
and a desperate mountaineer. Those were perilous times for an advocate
of temperance in my native state. Now out of one hundred and twenty
counties, one hundred and seven are dry. In Georgia the licensed
saloon is gone; in North Carolina the saloon is gone; in West
Virginia, Old Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee the saloon is gone,
while Oklahoma was born sober.
"That which made Milwaukee famous
Doesn't foam in Tennessee;
The Sunday lid in old Missouri
Was Governor Folk's decree.
Brewers, distillers and their cronies
Well may sigh;
The saloon is panic-stricken,
And the South's going dry.
"Soon the hill-side by the rill-side
Of Kentucky will be still;
Men will take their toddies
From the ripples of the rill;
Boys will grow up sober,
Mothers cease to cry;
Glory hallelujah!
The South's going dry."
Already seventeen states are dry, and there are many arid spots in the
wet states. While I cannot hope to live to see the final triumph, I
have faith to believe my children and my children's children will live
in a saloonless land, a land redeemed from a curse that has soaked its
social life in more blood and tears than all other sources of sorrow;
a land where liberty will no longer be shorn of its locks of strength
by licensed Delilahs; where manhood will no more be stripped of its
possibilities by the claws of the demon drink; where fore-doomed
generations will not reach the dawning of life's morning, to be bound
like Mazeppa to the wild, mad steed of passion and borne down the
blood lines of inheritance to the awful abuse of drunkenness.
To this end I appeal to every minister of the gospel, stir the
consciences of your hearers on this question. I appeal to the press,
that potent power for the enlightenment of the people.
"Pulpit and press with tongue and pen,
Set to new music this message to men:
Let the great work of destruction begin,
And rid our loved land of this shelter to sin.
As before the sun's brightness, the darkness must fly,
So by power of the ballot the rum curse must die,
Then cover the earth as the wide waves the sea,
With the sound of the axe at the root of the tree!"