12 GET ON THE WATER WAGON. committed the murders, the three persons who were killed and the little mother who dies of a broken heart. And now, I want to know, my farmer friend, if this has been a good commercial transaction for you. You sold a bushel of corn; you found a market; you got fifty cents; but a fraction of this product struck down seven lives, all of whom would have been consumers of your products for their life expectancy. And do you mean to say that is a good economic transaction to you? That disposes of the market question until it is answered, let no man argue further.” And say, my rnena&, New York City’s annual drink bill is $365,000,000 a year, $1,000,000 a day. Listen a minute! That is four times the annual output of gold, and it is at least one-third the value of all the coal mined in the United States. And in some sections of New York there is one saloon for every thirty families. The money spent in New York by the working people fo- drink in ten years would buy every working man in New York a beautiful home and allow $3,500 for house and lot. New York’s annual drink bill would buy 73,000,000 barrels of flour, nearly a barrel for every man and woman in the United States. It would take fifty people one year to count the money in $1 bills, and they would cover 10,000 acres of ground. That is what the people in New York dump into the whisky hole in one year. And then you wonder why there is poverty and crime, and that the country is not more prosperous. This gang is circulating a circular about Kansas City, Kansas. I defy you to prove a statement in it. Listen! Kansas City is a town of 100,000 population, and temperance went into effect July 1, 1906. They then had 250 saloons, 200 gambling hells and sixty houses of ill-fame. The population was largely foreign, and inquiries have come from Germany, Sweden and Norway, asking the influence of the enforcement of the prohibitory law. At the end of one year, the president of one of the largest banks in that city, a man who had protested against the enforcement of the prohibitory law on the ground that it would hurt business, found that at the end of one year his
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=