SALOON MEETINGS.
A young man, of splendid physique, of bright and formidable eye, the
very picture of strength and courage, who became an admirer of Mr.
Bryan during the late campaign, and, after careful and extensive
reading forsook the Republican party, embraced the New Democracy and
enlisted the week following the election as a Volunteer Speaker and
worker. He is an active member of the Young Men's Christian Association
and of the Christian Endeavor Society.
The first meeting he was asked to attend was held over a saloon. This
image of youthful power and courage walked through the bar-room of the
saloon with a disparaging air, sat down at a table beside the writer,
answered a few questions in a gloomy and dissatisfied manner and said
diplomatically that he had an engagement at another end of the city
and could not remain. He had promised to help arrange another meeting
a few blocks away and the next day partly fulfilled that promise by
carrying a bundle of circulars from the printing office to two men who
were to distribute them. He then suddenly dropped out of sight and has
never, so far as the movement is concerned, shown up since.
It has been learned that to a fellow churchman he remarked that he had
been attracted by the high and noble ideals of Mr. Bryan, had expected
to work for the cause, but that his attendance at a meeting in a
saloon was so offensive to him that he lost all heart and had given up
participation in the movement in consequence.
This man is only the type of a considerable class who would like to
have their fellow beings clean but would never help wash them, who
would dearly love to have them good but are too narrow to help save
them; who admire the poetry of patriotism but who cowardly shrink from
those sterner duties of which patriotism consists.
Think of a follower of Jesus Christ refusing to preach patriotism to
men because they are gathered in or over a saloon, after having been
denied the opportunity of meeting in a church or even a church yard.
If Jesus Christ had been so squeamish and "gentlemanly" as to have
confined his services to the respectable people, the early church would
have died before it was born. In no age has there been sufficient
vitality in the classes that call themselves respectable to give
permanent form to any social or religious movement. Those who wish to
do great things only in a respectable manner never do great things. A
man cannot at the same time be both great and respectable.
In order to be respectable, he must stifle genius and cover with the
ashes of artificiality all the deepest passions of the soul. He must
destroy his individuality and trim his sympathies as he does his beard,
like the barbarous Northmen when they entered Rome.
Love for humanity that can be checked or dissipated by inartistic
surroundings, contact with vice or the coarse companionship of
intemperate men is not love at all, it is a mere fad, a fitful remnant
of a religious instinct long since eaten out from within.
Imagine a mother talking about how she loves to have her baby clean
and sweet and wholesome, and then picture her refusing to undergo the
hardship required in making her child sweet and clean and wholesome.
Such a mother would be no mother at all, unless, perchance, a
stepmother or mother-in-law.
The young man referred to is a typical specimen of a sniveling,
impracticable and worthless counterfeit of religion, the only function
of which is to emasculate and weaken our youth. It serves to ease their
consciences and displace the instincts that prompt to goodness. For
courageous self-sacrifice, it substitutes the mumbling of prayers;
instead of active, righteous contact with the world it demands the
attendance at meetings in which love is expressed toward a phantasy
millions of miles up into the stars, while the Living God of Heaven and
earth is forgotten, and where imprecation, denunciation and charges of
wickedness are dealt out to those manly and courageous persons who lift
out a helping hand to the poor instead of praying for them and who
fight to make this world and this life heavenly instead of paying their
debts to their fellow creatures with mansions in the skies.
The refusal of this young man who, according to his own statement,
believed that the future welfare of the Nation depended upon the
triumph of the principles represented by Mr. Bryan, to assist in
spreading those principles in saloon meetings, means that his religious
and social training had unfitted him to do any great or noble thing,
unless in conformity with his Sunday-school manufactured tastes as to
nicety and elegance.
The young man sees the giant tree, injustice, and offers to assist in
cutting it down but, when we hand him an ax, refuses to take off his
coat and returns it saying that his little hatchet at home has a blue
ribbon around it and that he won't cut with any other.
He sings "Rescue the Perishing" at the Christian Endeavor meeting, a
pretty girl with pink cheeks and cherry lips on each side. The cheeks
and lips and song are so pleasing, he thinks he will go further and
help rescue the perishing. After careful study he is satisfied that
people are perishing for want of his friendly services and the services
of others like himself. Yet, when he is assigned a place to work, he
abruptly leaves his post of duty and goes back to prayer meeting,
because, poor boy, no carpet is on the floor, no angel pictures grace
the wall, and the tobacco smoke about him is offensive.
Innocent creature! Let him continue to sing his hymns and say his
prayers surrounded by pretty girls In the Christian Endeavor meeting
and pretty boys who should have been born girls, while the great forces
of reform fight the battles of the living God, conquer evil, destroy
injustice and lift up the fallen. We can do without him and without his
kind.
Not that we want to. We do not. We need all possible help. We will
not judge harshly all those who now are given over to such innocent
amusements. For the delicate white hand, the girlish student face, the
timid mamma's boy, taken from the prayer meeting and the Christian
Endeavor Society, once taught to see the great truths of social
salvation and human progress, does not always retreat in holy horror
when confronted with conflict and the smoke of battle. On the other
hand, such timid, singing, praying boys often become National heroes.
Before manhood is discovered by the growth of hair on the face, manly
character sometimes reaches maturity, with qualities developed, not
only superior to tobacco smoke at a saloon meeting, and the naughty
cuss words of the fellows who drink there, but to the smoke of powder
and the thunder of cannon.
Do not overlook nor belittle soft men, but ignore only those who stay
soft after you have tried the hardening process. For where one heart
may be formed of milk and water, the liquid state of another may be
that of molten steel, and may only require the cooling process of an
outdoor breeze to make it withstand the continuous persecution and
conflict of years.
There is no unholy place where men should not go who are fired by
a passion for justice. It is a fact that one of the centers of the
social life of the great cities of America and of Europe is the liquor
saloon. How much we may deplore this fact or the evil results that we
see flowing from it, is entirely another question. The fact remains in
spite of our deploring, our shocked ideals or our sympathies wrung by
the desolation and death caused by it, that the center of the social
life of our great cities, the place where society meets, (not that
floating, top-heavy buoy that calls itself society, but real society,
the people) is the liquor saloon.
At present it is managed in America, not with any reference whatever to
its social function, but merely for the private profit of individuals.
In order to increase their private profits and to defend their special
interests, the men who manage these saloons, as a general rule, abuse
their powers and add inconceivably to the horrors of the vice of
intemperence trying, by unnatural and vicious methods, to increase
their gain.
Not only this, but as the saloon is the center of the social life of
our American cities, the proprietors of saloons and the manufacturers
of liquors, who have associated their interests, have a terrible
and unnatural advantage in controlling the political power of the
people with whom they come in contact. They do not have to go where
the people are because the saloon keeper, in the natural and usual
performance of his business, is already in the midst of the people. He
always has a crowd. He is the greatest preacher of modern times. He
does not have to invent new methods for REACHING THE MASSES. He does
not have to scratch his bald head and say, "O, Lord! why are my sheep
deserting me?" The saloon keeper always has a congregation, always
a choir, is always surrounded by men in need of a friend, and, like
other members of the human family having a strange mixture of greed
and sympathy, cruelty and fellow-feeling, he exercises his charitable
instincts and lends a material helping hand to the members of his
congregation quite as often as do the five thousand and twenty thousand
dollar a year ministers who preach not to men drinking, but often to
men who have already drunk their fill.
The saloon keeper preacher, however, lacks one advantage possessed by
his more fortunate compeer of the church pulpit, for, where a member
of the saloon congregation has a perfect right to answer back and
correct misstatements, slanders and unjust vituperation, the friend
of the common people who happens into the fashionable city church
service must bite his lips and remain silent while the name of Jesus,
the revolutionist, the poor man's friend, is used to strengthen vile
calumny against His brave modern apostles who are fighting to realize
practically in government the principles represented by the cross.
Therefore, one of the most promising fields for the social reformer,
for the man who drinks beer and the man who drinks water, for the man
who smokes cigars and the man who washes his teeth before every meal
with charcoal powder and lives on vegetables, is the liquor saloon. It
is always open and you can go in without buying. You can take a seat
free of charge and you can talk. You have as much right to talk as
the bartender, and even if opposed to your principles, good business
judgment, if no other motive, prompts the average saloon keeper to be
tolerant. He cannot afford to drive away any large percentage of his
customers. You have a right, and even in the Republican saloons you
can get permission to declare the gospel of monopoly's downfall in the
back room, in the hall upstairs or in the main saloon, once a week,
without paying anything for heat, light or hall rent. These are already
furnished for the people who now go there. You do not need to advertise
the meeting, for there is always a crowd about the saloon. After you
have held two or three meetings they will grow in size and draw the
frequenters from other resorts.
The average saloon crowd is as open to conviction and as ready to be
taught concerning the moralizing of government and the establishment of
justice in the world as the average church congregation, and they will
treat you as civilly and listen as attentively even though every man
present disagrees with you.
Let the hundreds of saloons throughout our great cities be selected
as a mission field for the new gospel of manliness and brotherhood.
Christ went among publicans and wine-bibbers. We can afford to go among
wine-bibbers, even when they are Republicans. Our crowd may be small
at times but the kind of work that moves the world and builds up
civilization is work that is regular and continuous.
Let the Volunteers organize by twos, and the one, two or three evenings
a week that they can give to the cause, let those who choose this
work go to a saloon and tell the fellows there that under a proper
social system, each one of them can afford to have a home as sociable
and homelike and comfortable as a saloon; that, after they declare
their independence of the party whip, and, instead of obeying parties,
command them to do their bidding, they can soon have such opportunities
that they won't have to drink to forget their troubles, because they
will have no troubles; that they won't have to drink in order to
imagine that they are happy, because they will have real happiness;
that after the gold standard and monopoly are overthrown, there will be
a hundred different pleasures and opportunities opened to them, that
these will produce intoxication just as delicious as that produced
by wine and beer, and that every poor man who wants to drink will be
allowed to drink, not slops and refuse, but the same fluids that now
give the gout and dropsy to die millionaire.
The way to get up a saloon meeting is to see the proprietor, tell him
you are a Democrat, not a fraudulent, makebelieve hypocrite, using
the Democratic name to defeat Democratic principles, not an agent of
the gold bugs trying to corrupt the Democratic party, not an attorney
for monopoly attempting to pervert the Democratic organization to
help millionaires rob Democratic voters, but that you are a real
dyed-in-the-wool, anti-monopoly, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Bryan
Democrat, standing with all fours on the Chicago platform, the enemy of
its enemies, the foe of its traducers, and the opponent, uncompromising
and implacable of every man who upholds the infamous British Rothschild
gold standard of money. Tell him that you would like to talk to his
customers and a few others in his place every week, and show them how,
by united political action in the Democratic party, they can be made
just as happy as if they were drunk seven days each week.
He will let you come, and if you talk straight from the shoulder, you
will have a larger crowd at the second meeting than at the first. If
you keep the work up a year continuously, you will not only have your
name enrolled in the book of heroes, kept by the Democratic leaders,
but also in the book kept by the Divinity who guides the Nations. You
will be rewarded in this world for your sacrificing labor if you live
until the people crush monopoly, and if not, you will at least have
that consciousness of duty done which knows no time nor space.