GET ON THE WATER WAGON. 7 fill the jails, and the penitentiaries. Who has to pay the bills? The landlord who doesn’t get the rent because the money goes for whisky; the butcher, and the grocer, and the charitable person who take pity on the children of drunkards, and the tax-payer who supports the insane asylums and other institutions, that the whisky business keeps full of human wrecks. Do away with the cursed business and you will not have to put up to support them. Who gets the money? The saloon-keepers, and the brewers, and the distillers, while the whisky fills the land with misery, and poverty, and wretchedness, and disease, and death, and damnation, and it is being authorized by the will of the sovereign people. You say “that people will drink it anyway.” Not by my vote. You say, “men will murder their wives anyway." Not by my vote. “They will steal anyway.” Not by my vote. You are the sovereign people, and what are you going to do about it? Let me assemble before your minds the bodies of the drunken dead, who crawl away “into the jaws of death, into the mouth of Hell,” and then, out of the valley of the shadow of the drink; let me call the appertaining motherhood, and wifehood, and childhood, and let their tears rain down upon their purple faces. Do you think that would stop the curse of the liquor traffic? No! No! In these days when the question of saloon or no saloon is at the fore in almost every community, one hears a good deal about what is called “personal liberty.” These are fine, large, mouth-filling words and they certainly do sound first rate; but when you get right down and analyze them in the light of common old horse sense, you will discover that in their application to the present controversy they mean just about this: “Personal liberty,” is for the man who, if he has the inclination and the price, can stand up to a bar and fill his hide so full of red liquor that he is transformed for the time into an irresponsible, dangerous evil smelling brute. But “personal liberty” is not for his patient, long-suffering wife, who has to endure with what fortitude she may his blows and curses; nor is it for his children who, if they escape
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=