30 GET ON THE WATER WAGON. from these facts that the success of our business lies in the creation of appetite among the boys. Men who have formed the habit scarcely ever reform, but they, like others, will die, and unless there are recruits made to take their places, our coffers will be empty, and I recommend to you that money spent in the creation of appetite will return in dollars to your tills after the habit is formed.” What is' your raw material, saloons? American boys. Say, I would not give one boy for all the distilleries and saloons this side of Hell. And they have to have 2,000,000 boys every generation. And then you tell me you are a man, when you will vote for an institution like that. What do you want to do, pay taxes in money or in bo>J? I feel like an old fellow in Tennessee who made his living by catching rattle snakes. He caught one with fourteen rattles and put it in a box with a glass top. One day when he was sawing wood his little five-year-old boy, Jim, took the lid off and the rattler wriggled out and struck him in the cheek. He ran to his father and said: “The rattler has bit me.” The father ran and chopped the rattler to pieces, and with his jack-knife, he cut a chunk from the boy’s cheek and then sucked and sucked at the wound to draw out the poison. He looked at little Jim, watched the pupils of his eyes dilate and watched him swell to three times his normal size, watched his lips become parched and cracked, and his eyes roll, and little Jim gasped and died. The father took him in his arms, carried him over by the side of the rattler, got on his knees and said: “Oh, God, I would not give little Jim for all the rattlers that ever crawled over the Blue Ridge mountains.” And I would not give one boy for every dirty dollar you get from the hell-soaked liquor business or from every brewery and distillery this side of Hell. Listen! In a northwest city a preacher sat at his breakfast table one Sunday morning. The doorbell rang, he answered it, and there stood a little boy, twelve years of age He was on crutches, right leg off at the knee, shivering, and he said, “Please, sir, will you come up to the jail and talk and
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