Another, and if possible, more urgent reason why the saloon must go, has
recently been brought home to the people of this country with convincing
force. Americans have believed that this was the freest, happiest land
under the sun, and it is. Its government is the perfection of human
wisdom. It is, as the greatest of our Presidents has said, “a government
of the people, for the people, by the people.” No limitations or
restrictions are placed on the rights or liberty of any citizen, except
such as are necessary to protect the rights and liberty of all other
citizens. The humblest man in the land may aspire to the highest
official place, and it is a fact that a vast majority of those citizens
who have attained the loftiest honors sprang from the humblest walks in
life. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Blaine, Logan, and thousands of others
who might be named, are conspicuous illustrations of this truth. Ours is
a government of liberty, regulated by law. Its delegated and reserved
powers embody the ripest fruits of man’s experience with and knowledge
of man’s weakness and strength, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and
justice—embody, in fact, the experience of thirty centuries of human
progress. Only a few brief years ago, the people gladly and proudly
sacrificed 500,000 lives, and billions of treasure, in order to
preserve, for themselves and their children, this heritage of free
government.
But within the past decade there has been spawned upon our hospitable
shores a school of depraved and vicious foreigners, who are poisoning
and polluting the very atmosphere they breathe. Incapable of
comprehending the difference between absolute despotism and republican
freedom, confounding liberty with license, regarding all restraints of
law as tyranny, and denouncing all government as oppression, these
apostles of anarchy are sedulously sowing the seeds of discord, envy,
hate, rapacity, and murder. And where do these miscreants find the most
willing converts to their atrocious theories? Where do they assemble to
plot, to declaim, to conspire, and to argue? Read the reports of the
trial of the anarchists in Chicago, and you will ascertain. Read, in the
journals of any of our large cities, reports of anarchist and socialist
assemblies. Follow Most, and Schwab, and Spies, and Fielden, and
Parsons, to their favorite haunts. Do this, and you will find that the
saloon is always and everywhere the assembly room, the school house, the
tabernacle of these wild, vicious and dangerous apostles of lawlessness.
There they teach their ferocious doctrine, “burn, and murder, and
plunder, in order to live.” There they find the ignorant and brutalized
human beings whose besotted minds and deadened consciences make them
ready converts to the monstrous theories that property is robbery, that
law is oppression, that government is tyranny, that religion is a cheat,
and that everything mankind has been taught to revere should be
proscribed and destroyed.