6 GET ON THE WATER WAGON. temperate parents; eighty per cent of the paupers; eighty-twc per cent of the crime is committed by men under the influence of liquor; ninety per cent of the adult criminals are whisky made. The Chicago Tribune kept track for ten years and found that 53,556 murders were committed by men under the influence of liquor. Archbishop Ireland, the famous Roman Catholic of St. Paul, said of social crime today, “That seventy-five per cent is caused by drink, and eighty per cent of the poverty. I go to a family and it is broken up, and I say, “What caused this?” Drink! I step up to a young man on the scaffold, and say, “What brought you here?” Drink! Whence all the misery, and sorrow, and corruption? Invariably it is drink. Five Points, in New York, was a spot as near like Hell as any spot on earth. There are five streets that run to this point, and right in the middle was an old brewery, and the streets on either side were lined with grog-shops. The newspapers turned a search light on the district, and before they could stop it, the first thing they had to do was to buy the old brewery and turn it into a mission, and today it is a decent, respectable place. “The saloon is the sum of all villainies. It is worse than war or pestilence. It is the crime of crimes. It is the parent of crimes and the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of misery and crime in the land, and the principal cause of crime. It is the source of three-fourths of the crime, and, of course, it is the source of three-fourths of the taxes to support that crime.” And to license such an incarnate fiend of Hell is the dirtiest, low-down, damnable business on top of this old earth. There is nothing to be compared to it. The Legislature of Illinois appropriated $6,000,000 in 1908 to take care of the insane people in the State, and the whisky business produces seventy-five per cent of the insane. That is what you go down in your pocket for to help support. If I remember rightly, the Legislature appropriated nearly $9,000,000 to take care of the state institutions. Do away with the saloon, and you will close these institutions. The saloons make them necessary, and they make the poverty, and
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