16 GET ON THE WATER WAGON. motive. And it pays nothing back but disease and damnation and gives an extra dividend in delirium tremens and a free pass to Hell. And then it will let your wife be buried in the potter’s field, and your children go the asylum, and. yet you walk out and say that the saloon is a good institution, when it is the dirtiest thing on earth. It hasn’t one leg to stand on and has nothing to commend it to a decent ihan, not one thing. “But,” you say, “we will regulate it by high license.” Regulate what by high license? You might as well try and regulate a powder mill in Hell. Do vou want to pay taxes in boys, or dirty money? A man that will sell out to that dirty business I have no use for. See how absurd their arguments are. If you drink Bourbon in a saloon that pays $1,000 a year license, will it eat your stomach less than if you drink it ir a saloon that pays $500 license? Is it going to have any different effect on you, whether the gang pays $500 or $1,000 license? No. It will make no difference whether you drink it over a mahogany counter or a pine counter, it will have the same effect'on you; it will damn you. So there is no use talking about it. In some insane asylums, do you know what they do? When they want to test some patient to see whether he has. recovered his reason, they have a room with a faucet in it, and a cement floor, and they give the patient a mop and tell him to mop up the floor. And if he has sense enough to turn off the faucet and mop up the floor, they will parole him, but should he let’ the faucet run, they know that he is crazy. Well, that is what you are trying to do. You are trying to mop it up with taxes, and insane asylums', and jails, and Keeley cures, and reformatories. The only thing to do is to shut off the source of supply. A man was delivering a temperance address at a fair grounds and a fellow came up to him and said, “Are you the fellow that gave a talk on temperance?” “Yes.” “Well, I think that the managers did a dirty piece of business to let you give a lecture on temperance. You have hurt my business, and my business is a legal one.”
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