22 GET ON THE WATER WAGON. tional bank stock in the United States into the whisky hole last year, and we didn’t fill the hole up at that. What is the matter? Say, whenever the day comes that all the Catholic and Protestant churches—-just when the day comes when you will say to that whisky business: “You go to Hell,” that day the whisky business will go to Hell, but you sit there, you old whisky-voting elder and deacon and vestryman, and you wouldn’t strike your hands together on the proposition. It would stamp you an old hypocrite and you know it. Say, hold on a little bit. Have you got a silver dollar ? I am going to show you how it is burned up. We have in this country 250,000 saloons, and allowing fifty feet frontage for each saloon it makeg a street from New York to Chicago, and 5,000,000 men, women and children go daily into the saloons' for drink. And marching twenty miles a day it would take thirty days to pass this building, and marching five abreast they would reach 590 miles. There they go, look at them! On the first day of January, 500,000 of the young men of our nation entered the grog-shop and began a public career hellward, and on the thirty-first of December I will come back here and summon you people, and ring the bell and raise the curtain and say to the saloons and breweries: “On the first day of January, I gave you 500,000 of the brain and muscle of our land, and I want them back and have come in the name of home, and church and school; father, mother, sister, sweetheart, give me back what I gave you. March out.” I count, and 165,000 have lost their appetites and have become muttering, bleary-eyed drunkards, wallowing in their own excrement, and I say: “What is it I hear, a funeral dirge?” What is that procession? A funeral procession 3,000 miles long and 110,000 hearses in the procession. One hundred and ten thousand men die drunkards in this land of the free and home of the brave. Listen! In an hour twelve men died drunkards, 300 a day and 110,000 a year. One man will leap in front of a train, another will plunge into a river, another will plunge from the dock into a lake, another will throw his hands to his head and life will end. Another will
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