03.05. How Shall We Remove the Evil?

How Shall We Remove the Evil? This is the most difficult of all questions relating to the evils of intemperance. Many answers are given by those who wish the world to be saved from the demon. We have also many suggestions from the enemy himself. Not unfrequently he at­tends our councils and tenders his advice. Some­times we have been decoyed into covenant-making with him, and have found always, when too late, that we had lost our virtue and power by our unrighteous obeisance to him whose work it is to ruin our cause. Daily and hourly are the workers in the cause of humanity enlightening each other respecting the best methods of dealing with the monster of intemperance. Of course we will sus­pect each other’s loyalty to the cause, or exercise an unpleasant amount of charity for those who differ from us. This is because we are severally right on the subject, and those who differ from us are either in favor of saloons or their temperance education has been sadly neglected. When we are less infallible we will understand one another better.

Moral persuasion is always a legitimate power to employ against money. Hence it is evident that in every effort to pledge men against the use of that which can intoxicate, every speech that is made in favor of total abstinence, every article written and printed, every tract circulated in favor of the truth, every organization by which this work may be carried forward, by which men may be induced to return from drinking habits and others kept from falling into the snares of the tempter, is in the right direction. All honor to all the Ribbon Movements, to Good Templars, Sons of Temperance and Temple of Honor workers. Let them work on; let the Father Mathew Societies be kept up; let the Bands of Hope and Juvenile Templars bring up the rear of this great army. They are co-workers in the mighty army. But some have thought that this is "ONLY A MORAL QUESTION."

He who holds this view says that no law can remove the appetite for drink, and therefore this work must be accomplished by moral means. This was the profound folly of ex-Governor Seymour, of New York, to say nothing of still wiser men.

Let me utter my logic as a match for this: "No persuasion can remove the appetite for drink; therefore, men must be saved by prohibition, which will put the drink, and the temptation to drink, out of the way." In the attempt at logic made by my brother, one premise is assumed which is not true. It is that, in order to remove drunkenness from the land, the appetite for drink must be destroyed. It is also assumed, in an attempt at a second syllogism in the same combination, that moral persuasion will re­move the appetite for drink. This again is untrue. While my logic was not put into logical form, it will bear the pressure.

Hence my position is logically true, while that of my friend is logically untrue. There is only one fault with the syllogism which I offered. My first premise seems to deny that any man can be reformed in the presence of temptation. I am will­ing to grant that some have been reformed and saved in the presence of temptation. But the num­ber is very small, and with the moral persuasion ap­pliances only, more than forty men are going down to one that is coming back.

Hence when a man begins to talk to me of there being no other way to redeem the world from drunkenness except by moral persuasion, I am impress­ed with the feeling that he takes me for a simpleton.

There can be no doubt that, so far as the drinker is concerned, moral persuasion can be employed legit­imately, and sometimes with good results. Many have been turned back again from incipient drunkenness by the power of moral persuasion. But when we look on and see that for every one of our men we disentangle from the meshes of this abomin­ation, Satan inveigles forty-three more, we despair of saving the world by moral persuasion alone.

Every question has its moral phase if it in any way relates to right and wrong. All the crimes in the catalogue are to be dealt with by moral means—theft, murder, fraud, infamy, are all moral questions and are to be dealt with by moral persuasion. And there is as much reason to refuse pro­hibition respecting one of these as another. Sup­pose I should say that no law can remove the propensity of the thief; therefore law is not to be employed in the case. Suppose, then, that having perpetrated this immense nonsense, I should make it the foundation of another position and say, "Therefore, the only means by which theft is to be removed is the use of moral persuasion!" I know this would be foolishness; and yet it is exactly parallel with the moral persuasion-alone-argument on the liquor question. A man who believes in moral persuasion alone usually persists in misunderstanding prohibition­ists, and denies that they believe in any moral persuasion at all in order to save men from drunken­ness. Yet I never saw a prohibitionist that did not believe in the use of all the persuasion that can be made effectual in removing the curse from the earth. Their position is moral persuasion for the drinker, and legal persuasion for the rum seller. It is my opinion that legal persuasion will have to be applied to the drinker. It is so employed after a kind now. Indeed, the license form of this ques­tion is legal persuasion for the drinker and moral persuasion for the rum-seller.

Moral means, as a rule, are ineffectual with the saloon-keeper. What he wants is the money. Give him that and you may have all the morals. And while some who have gotten into drinking habits may be persuaded to return to a temperate life, many of them seem to have gone beyond the reach of hope; and the only persuasion that will reach the case is that of the law. It is probable, there­fore, that both drinking and selling that which can intoxicate will have to be punished by law. And while many drinkers will have to be with­held from the crime of drunkenness by the author­ity of law, there may be a few saloon-keepers who can be influenced to quit their nefarious business by moral persuasion. I would, therefore, try the soft words and the handfuls of turf, and, if successful in that way, all right; but, if not, I would use stones without any compunction whatever.

Just now there is a religious feature to the ques­tion that is both promising and sad. In this new idea men persuade themselves that IT IS THE WORK OF GOD TO REMOVE INTEMPERANCE.

Those who hold this view usually disparage the use of law. Mr. Murphy has nothing but good will and kind words for saloon-keepers; and they hold him in very high esteem. The great revival that he held in Pittsburg carried everything before it; but its noise had hardly died out on the air when there were seventy-two more saloons in the city than at the beginning of his great revival. A few places, even in civilized Iowa, have suffered from this same religious gush. Men have been taught that with sound conversion the Holy Ghost would destroy all appetite for drink, extract the poison from their systems, and heal up their ulcer­ated stomachs. In the midst of the whirl and ex­citement, men have loudly professed this physical sanctification. But when the fervor of the occa­sion has subsided, the sow returns to the mire; and, after a few months of sobriety and industry, they have returned, to spend the money they have made with the "noble saloon-keeper." I do not wish to call such performances a farce. Many who engage in them are honest, severely honest. But it is only the part of candor to confess that but little, if any good, has been accomplished that has not been counter-balanced by the religious untruths that have been taught, and the shilly-shally softness with which the whole question has been treated.

It is not enough to say to men who take God at his word that there is no promise in the Bible that God will heal up a drunkard’s stomach any more than he will put back on the hand that he has cut off in some drunken fit. Hence the frenzy that has come from this false teaching cannot be otherwise than injurious. As well might we expect men to fill and fatten on the east wind as to receive any lasting benefit from such religious froth and pious nonsense.

We should use religious persuasion; we should bring every man to Christ that we can; and we can assure them that God will help them if they continue to help themselves. But any effort that leaves men so nearly unconverted as to be satis­fied with the existence of saloons, can have but very little of promise in it. In so far as this movement has called public attention to the sub­ject of temperance, good has been the result. Agitation is the handmaid of truth. But to the extent that men have been reconciled to the ex­istence of saloons, unmitigated evil is the result.

I will help no man, nor movement, that helps the saloons; and to have a revival of the kind I have described in the town where I live would be a real calamity. I would pray for temperance; I would work for temperance; I would live for tem­perance; I would vote for temperance. When I pray I must pray in faith; but to pray in faith I must ask for what God has promised to give; also, I must comply with the conditions upon which the blessing is to be enjoyed. Hence I cannot pray to God to remove the curse of intemperance by doing what he has never promised to do; and I must, to the utmost of my ability, answer my own prayers.

There are many yet who say that the only law that can be of any benefit is a

LICENSE.

Every law should be judged, at least in part, by its object. And we are to suppose some worthy object to have been before the minds of men when the idea of licensing the sale of liquor was be­gotten. The end proposed was to remove the disgrace, and curtail the injuries of the traffic.

I notice a fallacy in this system to begin with. It is that the sale of liquors is not a crime in itself; hence, only the abuse needs to be pre­vented. This idea has been duly prominent in all the license laws that have been made till within the last ten or fifteen years. Men have been enlightened on the subject, of late, till it is now regarded as an evil under any circumstances. And under the direction of this advanced idea, those who have favored the license system have done so on the ground that the evil could not be sup­pressed, and that all we could do with it would be to hinder it from working the fearful ravages in human society that it is likely to work unless con­trolled by law. This last view is inconsistent with Christianity. If a thing is wrong, we do not dare to legalize it, or give to it the sanction of law. To do so would be to throw around a crime the protection and respectability of our government; and, to the ex­tent of our protection, we become partakers of other men’s sins. If a thing is right, then we have no more right to tax it in this way than we have to impose a stamp act, and compel all commod­ities to pay duty, or, at least, all luxuries to do so. Hence, logically, we have no right to license the liquor traffic, whether right or wrong.

Now, if crime is to be regulated by law, espe­cially that of the sale of alcohol, I cannot see why a man should not be required to take out a license to drink it. This, too, might go to in­crease the school fund! And a man would then have purchased the right to any kind of a debauch that might happen to suit his peculiar taste. It would then be his right to squander his means with the "gentlemen of good moral character and standing" who have been employed by the people to corrupt their sons, impoverish the community, and ruin the country. Having purchased this lib­erty with a great sum of money, he would then be free, not only to drink whisky, but to commit whatever crimes it might prompt. And whatever of infamy, of theft, of lust unbridled, of brutality, beastiality and loathsomeness that would naturally follow his inebriety, would have all been arranged and provided for by the prepaid indulgence! No man could then call in question his right to beat his wife for not having dinner ready for her lord, when there was nothing to make it of, and no fuel to cook it with; for this would be one of the con­sequential privileges that he would have purchased in obtaining his license! This would surely make it all right! No one could object to a gentleman like that having the privilege of wrecking his man­hood, impoverishing his family, and losing his own soul; especially if he would first pay a sum of money into our school fund for such a pleasure and privilege! Besides, it would not at all incon­venience him. He could as easily prove a good character before the law as the saloon-keeper. Let the license law, then, be made consistent with it­self, or let it be repealed.

I think I hear a murmuring objection, that this is not a fair statement of the question; that the evils are upon us, and that they simply make choice between them; that they only prefer the evils that will occur under a license system to the greater evils that would occur in the absence of such a law; that this is the only available means by which they can ever lessen the terrible results of the existence and use of alcohol. The fallacy of this may be made to appear by striking out "liquor traffic," and inserting "mur­der." Let me claim to believe that, since the time that Cain murdered Abel, this crime has been repeated annually, and almost hourly, under what­ever laws have been enacted against it. There­fore, as law cannot remove the evil from the world, we must license it! I am, therefore, justifiable in helping to sustain a "license-murder-law," as the best thing that may be done under the cir­cumstances. Would I be regarded as favoring the protection of the people? But I very distinctly tell you that I am in favor of suppressing murder; but, until the people are better educated than we find them at present, any effort to prohibit this crime by law will be a failure, and that such at­tempts to control the people, without the ability to succeed, will have the effect to render all law nugatory. Hence, I will license murder, and make it legitimate and respectable, and thus educate the world to abhor it to such an extent that we will be enabled to pass and execute a law prohibiting it! To take such a position would demand a vast amount of dignity and bustling pretension, to make me respectable in the minds of Christian men, who are given to that mental movement called thought. My brethren, west of the Mississippi especially, would not possess the mental acuteness to distinguish between my course and aiding and abetting the murderer. Do you say that the cases are not parallel? I know it. The murderer kills but a few men, while the rum trade kills sixty thousand annually. Not only so, but the murderer leaves their good name and their souls untouched, while the liquor traffic robs them, kills them, and damns them; fills the land with heart-broken wives, mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, with orphaned children, desolate homes, squalid poverty, and sows the land with seeds of shameless, nameless criminality, that send their pestiferous roots downward till they have sapped the foundation of every virtue, and raised their branches aloft, the very shade of which is spiritual death and moral putridity. This argument is sometimes made for a pro­tection at this point:

This, however, is special pleading. It assumes the point in debate, that the license law is all that he can get and operate; which, if all temperance men were united, would not be true in a single State in the Union. Again, this pleading is pre­sented in justification of the efforts made in favor of the license system. If it could be proven to be our duty to quietly accept a license under some peculiar circumstances, it would say nothing in favor of contending for a license, when it is con­fessedly not the law that is wanted, when the law we do want may possibly be obtained. The idea of voting and working for a law, which, in the nature of things, is wrong, in order to accept something called the lesser evil, is the doctrine condemned by Paul in the Roman letter: "Let us do evil that good may come!"

But, again, some philosopher objects that we assume knowledge of the right and wrong in mat­ters of law which is not granted. The right and wrong of law must be determined by the con­dition of the people to whom such law is given. Hence, we must judge of a law by its competency to prevent the wrong and assist the right; to the extent of success in these things is the law valu­able. Moses gave Israel a permit of divorcement, not because the law was the best in itself, but be­cause it was the best for the times. The hardness of the hearts of the people made him give them this law; it being the best that could then be enforced.

Observation will convince any thoughtful person, however, that the cases are not at all similar. If you will read, and critically examine Deu 24:1-2, you will find that the divorcement referred to by the Savior in Mat 19:1-30 contained strong prohibitory features. It was less in keeping with the original purpose of marriage than the teaching of the Master. But when we have gone to the utmost limit of the words employed, we have, by Moses, a prohibitory law, not a license law, to regulate, or, rather, to remove a social evil. This law, however, was less complete in the prohibitory features than the one afterward given by the Savior. Here, then, is the logic. Because of the hardness of the hearts of that people Moses gave us a law less strict in its prohibitory features than the one Jesus gave, therefore, in this enlight­ened day, when a majority of the people want a prohibitory law, we are justified in licensing men to spread a snare for the feet of the unsuspecting and unwary, to give their neighbor drink, to put the bottle to him and make him drunken also! See Hab 2:15. It seems to me that when Deu 24:1-2 is cited in favor of the right, under any circumstances, to license the liquor trade, there has been wanting an exegesis of the passage, or a willingness to have perfect justice done the sub­ject. Let no one hold me accountable for this impression of mine. It is only my impression.

It might be pertinent here to ask, what benefits can be derived from a license law of any kind? The thing can be done, no matter whatever it may be, as well without a license as with it. In fact, just the same. So far as it is really a license law, it has but one power, and that is to defend the thing licensed. This defense by law of a crime renders it still more difficult to be met, since now the law of the land is made to protect it, and give to it the tone of respectability. The only ability in any license system to pre­vent vice and crime is to be found in its prohib­itory features; such as, thou shalt not sell to minors, men that are in a state of intoxication, to men who are in the habit of becoming intox­icated, to any one on Sunday or on days of elec­tion; or, if the man commits nuisance or permits gambling, or violates any of the conditions of his license, his authority to sell may be taken away al­together, and in this case be a total prohibition—where the people are sufficiently educated. Hence, if a law was wholly license, it could not do any good, since it could not impart any right to do that which would be beneficial, for that right ex­ists independent of any license; while it might have the power to fasten upon even an unwilling people untold and unending evils. I repeat it, then, with emphasis, that, in the nature of things, merely a license law has but one power, and that is to perpetuate the wrong. But I must notice the policy argument.

It is claimed that a license law is more accept­able to the masses of people, that it is more easily enforced than a prohibitory law, and yet that it contains features of prohibition that will go far to­ward removing the evils of intemperance; indeed, much further than more ultra-prohibitory measures.

Here I am impressed with the evidence of a contradiction. It is tacitly acknowledged in their argument that, (1) the rum trade is an evil; (2) the only way to remove the evil is to prohibit the trade; (3) therefore we must permit the trade or license it! Such is the logical nonsense of this argument. But someone says we prefer to put it in this form: (1.) A mild form of prohibition is the best way to remove the evil: (2.) A judicious license law furnishes that form of prohibition. (3.) There­fore a license law is best calculated to remove the evil. But I ask, Why license the sale of rum in any way? Whether its sale is right or wrong, the traffic can be carried on just as well without the license as with it; and if the law contains prohib­itory features, for which alone it is valuable, why not incorporate those features into a law by them­selves, and leave the rest out? Will our licensing a man to sell to one class of men enable us the better to prohibit him from selling to another? Now, I am just impressed with the idea that no man in his senses will say yes.

There remains, then, no reason why a law re­lating to this question should contain any license features.

I hate a monopoly in anything, for it can only lead to tyranny—at least such is its history. But why a monopoly should be allowed in rum-selling more than in anything else, I do not know. As to its preventing bad men from selling, it is the merest nonsense in existence. Scarcely will any other man seek for^- or obtain a license; for no man who has the cause of humanity at heart will, un­derstandingly, engage in such a nefarious business. Hence it makes money the standard of character necessary to engage in this traffic. Now, I think that any poor wretch who may want to deal out poison by the ten cents’ worth, ought to have the same right to take the life of his fellow-man for money that the rich man has. As this is a free country, let him exercise his gift. The whisky that he would sell would only make loafers, loungers, vagabonds; brutalize, debauch, ruin, blunt all the finer sensibilities of the soul; cause poverty, destroy the peace in the family and in society, de­throne the reason and wreck the manhood; sow the seeds of degradation and death; bloat and blacken and blister and blight the body; fill the country with helpless orphans and broken-hearted widows, and cover the land with shame and dis­grace, just the same as that which is sold by that more fortunate gentleman who is able to sport "a good moral character!" And hence the injustice of our law must be apparent, as it refuses one of the inalienable (?) rights to a poor, worthless crea­ture, for no other reason than his want of money to buy license to kill men and be happy and respectable! But there is sometimes a plea made for the license law like this: We must license the sale of ruin, so that it may come legitimately under the control and regulation of law. Such a plea, how­ever, is utterly void of any common sense. We would here pay it no attention but for our respect for those who offer it. There are many crimes of minor importance that our law deals with by pro­hibiting them. If any man would argue that we must license theft, or larceny, or fraud, in order to bring it under the control of law, it would only excite contempt for the author. The argument itself is really based upon the idea that selling whisky is not wrong in itself; but it is only when abused by being conducted in an improper manner. This, however, we have already considered, and have decided that the traffic in intoxicants is the most withering, blighting curse than has ever befallen our country. Still further, it is evident that when the saloon is raised in the scale of its degradation looking toward decency, its power for evil is increased; that it then becomes capable of deceiving many who would never be decoyed into one of those lower haunts of vice. Hence, the saloon business is a crime against humanity, and, like any other crime, cannot be regulated. That is not what law proposes to do with crime. Sup­pose that we talk sentimentally about regulating murder by law? Our logic would then only equal that of those who argue that we must regulate the rum traffic by a license law!

1. All these laws, so far as known to the writer, have undertaken to legislate against the drunkard. If a man is found in a state of intoxication, he may be arrested by the city marshal, put into the cooler till morning, then fined by the mayor five or ten dollars, and sent home to his family, penniless, friendless, and hopeless. The money that might have furnished starving children with food has been taken to satisfy the demands of law and political conscience; but he by whose machina­tions, inducements and temptations this man has been made a drunkard walks abroad without cen­sure. It was a silly fly to be caught by the spider; but for that folly punishment has been meted out. The fly is a simpleton, I grant, but the spider is the cold-blooded criminal. If the old fly has fallen a prey to the tempter, should there be a law among insects that would punish all the young at home; thus increasing the suffering consequent upon parental vanity or folly, and at the same time license Mr. Spider to continue his depreda­tions without let or stint? The man has made a fool of himself in getting drunk, and the license law visits his folly upon the heads of the wife and innocent and helpless chil­dren, while the man who, more than all others is to blame in the matter, is petted and pampered, and protected by the law that talks of justice!

2. A man may be dangerous to society while drunk--murder may be the probable result of a single drink—but in the midst of temptation the drinker does not realize his condition. The drink is sold, the brain is maddened, the murder is committed, and the insane actor is punished with death or imprisonment for life, while the real mur­derer walks in company with the respectable, and is to be honored as a worthy citizen! True, the saloon-keeper may have had no quarrel with the deceased. What he did was only for the money he got for the drink; and yet, but for that drink the murder had not been committed. He may have been wholly indifferent as to the results of that drink; and yet the two facts that fasten crime are found in his history: 1. He knew its probable results; and, 2. He sold the liquor in full view of such probabilities. Here, then, is the injustice of all license law. It sentences one man, who was impelled by the maddening power of drink, while the man who is more to blame than any other goes free!

3. If one man should kill 60,000 men he would be the most notorious murderer of this age. No matter how he might accomplish this destruction of life—whether he poisoned the air or the water—the deed would be the same. Nor would it be any amelioration to find that he had no personal ill-will against any of his victims. And though we find that for this horrible deed he received one billion in gold, even this temptation would not be accepted as an apology. But the rum-trade kills that many annually, and yet we license it to con­tinue. When I say rum-trade, I put the business in the place of the saloonists who prosecute it. Hence these men are as guilty of murder as one man would be who would poison the water or the atmosphere, or by some device decoy the unsuspecting multitudes into a snare by which the same results would be reached. They cannot be re­leased from this charge on the plea that the work has been divided among 160,000 men. Neither law nor justice can permit them to escape in that way. Does someone say that it is not known in any one case that death has been the result of the individual work of any one man? This statement, however, is not true. It is known in hundreds of cases just where the liquor was obtained by which the death was caused. And yet, if it could not be clearly and certainly shown who shot the man last, they are all guilty of shooting to the extent of their opportunities and ammunition. Does another say that these men have not severally known the result of the liquor, beforehand, and therefore have not been guilty of murder? I answer that they do know the probable consequences of the whole trade; and hence, in the light of the facts, they drive their business in the face of the murder that results therefrom. Let me illustrate: Five men ask a license to shoot among a thousand. The license is granted. They shoot without taking aim. Two men are killed. These were the prob­able results before shooting, and are found to have been the consequence of the sport of these game­sters. We may prove that neither one of these men could know that he killed a man; but when all the facts are reported, these men would be convicted of murder by any law except a license law. Such a law might clear them, for it is par-deeps criminis. Hence, we say it boldly, that the average saloon-keeper knows that he is destroying human life, but for the sake of the money gotten from the trade he continues to kill, and is in every proper sense of the word a murderer!

Therefore we emphasize the injustice of the law in that it discriminates between criminals, and that it defeats the ends of justice thereby.

Sometimes it is argued that the saloon-keeper is not responsible for this drunkenness; that he does not ask men to get drunk and butcher each other in this fearful way: he does not sell without the consent of the men themselves. Suppose this were all true, what then? Will the fact that men have been willing to be duped into this loss of property, manhood, honor, and even life, lessen the crime upon the part of these tempters and seducers? But for their work this slaughter would never occur. They know this, and are therefore guilty in the full meaning of the term.

Suppose that a man who is skilled in the black art should come into your town exhibiting his attainments. He invites young men to come up and sit with him on the platform, assuring them that he can pass his hand over their eyes and de­ment them so that they will never know anything more. But a hundred young men, full of con­fidence in themselves, deny his ability to injure them in that way. Then follows the test. It is seen by the audience that the work has been done. See the frantic mothers rushing upon the plat­form, each one calling to her son, to bring back his mental powers. But all to no purpose. Reason has fled; and now they are a set of idiots who stare at those who speak to them; but they know not anything. The mothers rush upon the con­jurer in the wildness of despair—"Bring my son to his right mind again." Watch that sneer on the countenance of that hardened trickster, as he says: "Ladies, I have done with your boys all that I proposed to do, and I cannot bring them back again. I did not force them into this exper­iment; they undertook the matter of their own accord. Hence, as I gave them fair warning, I am in no way responsible for the results." Would your city fathers license him to continue his efforts to dement the youth of your city? Will the fact that it was by their choice that the trial was had, make his experiments any less injurious? Will the people excuse him on that plea? He was more honorable than the rum-seller; he told just what he would do. The saloon-keeper hides the results of his experiments. He says to young men: "Come in and have a good time." They walk in, and he ruins them. Is he now excusable on the ground of their willingness to take the risk? Suppose that he advertised his goods as one man does in this State (Iowa): "NOSE PAINT;" "THE ROAD TO HELL;" would even a correct advertisement make his work any less awful? There would be a little infernal boldness in such performances; but nothing that could wipe out the evil done, or make him less than a murderer when he kills men. No matter if he should say on his sign: "I will take your money, waste your time, make fools of you, rob you of your fortune, your honor and your manhood; I will bloat your body and remove your reason; I will corrupt your morals and dis­grace you in the eyes of all intelligent people; I will madden your brain, and send you home to kill your wife and children or your neighbor; I will take your life by inches, and damn you for­ever." This would of course be but a partial advertisement; and yet it is true as far as it goes. But would that correct advertisement make him anything less than a murderer? Though he ac­knowledges that it is his legitimate business to empty the community of all its morals, waste its energies and resources, and take the lives of its best men; and though, after that fair warning, the people invite him to engage in his work in their midst, he is still guilty, and should be punished according to the magnitude of his crimes.

4. Our law prohibits incest, infamy, bigamy, theft, robbery, fraud, manslaughter, murder, etc., and then licenses that which is the parent of all these crimes. Nine-tenths of all the criminality in our land is caused by the sale and use of intox­icating drinks. If we must license crime, let us license the smaller evils and prohibit the greater ones. Let us license thieving, infamy, murder, but not that which lies at the root of all the evils known to men and demons.

If only our people could be made to realize their responsibility, that what we do by the hands of another we do as really as if we acted inde­pendently of such an agent; that when we make a law that permits crime to run riot at noonday, and that when men are killed as the result of such a law, that we are guilty of the blood of a brother, we might be still more aroused on the question than what we are. Having witnessed the utter in­competency of the license system to bring us any relief from the evils of intemperance; finding that it has failed, as it must, of any practical good to those States that have tried it; seeing that it is wrong, in the nature of things, to license that which is evil, and that the sale of whisky is the greatest evil of the present time, we ask, Are we not ready now to deal sensibly with this question? While men are ready to exercise common sense in reference to all other crimes, we wonder how long it will be before the crime of rum-selling may be dealt with in justice.

I will now state my objections to the license system numerically:

1. A LICENSE LAW CANNOT BE ENFORCED IN ANY RESPECT IN WHICH THE PEOPLE SHALL BE BENEFITED.

If this proposition is too sweeping, it may be modified by easily, or not well. What I want to affirm is, that a license law necessarily stands in opposition to all effort to prevent the sale of rum. If the law contains prohibitory features, then, in so far, it is prohibition and not license, and all its license features are in antagonism to them. By the very fact that the law will license a certain traffic, that traffic is defended from all forcible op­position. In throwing around the business such a safeguard, the law has plainly said that it is legal and right, and therefore not to be hindered.

Take into account the many opportunities of avoiding the law under a license system, and they render the chances for the enforcement of its regu­lations very small indeed. To begin with, the man that is thus permitted and indorsed to drive his trade is a villain, and cares nothing for the law. I do not say that all saloon-keepers are murderers and thieves, for some of them may be ignorant of the results of their work. But most of them know what they are doing, and thus engage in cold-blooded murder. This they do for money, knowing that their money will make them respectable. It would be unrea­sonable to expect such men to observe any law that would stand in the way of their business. The chances to sell directly or indirectly to mi­nors, or men who are intoxicated, or those who are in the habit of getting drunk, are only limited by the wish and the means of his victims. If we were to enter all the saloons in the United States at one time, say at 9 o’clock at night, we would unearth as many minors, or nearly as many, as those who were of the age prescribed by the law, and we would get the proof that saloon men care nothing for the law. Do you say, then, they are liable to heavy punishment? How are you going to prove them guilty? They have corrupted the community, until no law in that place can be en­forced against them. In every way they are as­sisted in evading the law. They do everything in the darkness and under the cover which the law provides. The law may license the sale of wine, ale and beer, and prohibit the stronger drinks. But how are we to know what he sells? A man who will go there, and get the one of these, will get any other drink there just as well. And, respecting poisoned liquors, he has every chance to drug them that would please his depravity; and, with­out a constabulary, or some system that a license law never provides, there can be found no means of knowing what he sells. All the chances for the evasion of any law restricting his wishes in the matter are granted that he could wish. It is no matter of wonder, then, that every saloon-keeper in the country favors license and opposes pro­hibition.

2. There is no way to protect ourselves against the vilest men on the earth under a license law. Do you say that they must have twelve men to go on their bonds, certifying that they are men of good moral character and standing? But who are these bondholders? Any men who may be freeholders. But a man who is low enough in his morals to encourage a saloon does not care a fig whether the man has any character or not. He knows, if he has common sense, that men of good morals would not engage in the traffic. But that does not matter. He wishes the saloon, and will go on any bond, and for any man, in order that the thing may succeed. Here, then, is another feature in the license system that is deceptive.

3. The low tone of morals begotten by saloons will render any law regulating or prohibiting in­temperance nugatory.

If the license law succeeded in making sa­loons decent and respectable then it would ruin all the more. A young man does not begin to drink in those low, dirty dens of debauchery. He pre­fers to be a respectable gentleman, who can take a glass or let it alone; he wishes to move in re­spectable society, and will not, therefore, go to one of those low-order-saloons. But those houses where no drunkenness is permitted, and where honorable men go to pass a social hour, are the places competent to decoy him from the path of rectitude. Hence, if the license system could be made to accomplish its purpose, of making saloons respectable, and removing from them the drunkenness, revelry and murder that occur in them, it would only enable them the more certainly to de­ceive the unsuspecting, and then lead them into those habits that will certainly ruin them. The principle of license is wrong. And if it could be found that prohibition will not pro­hibit, still, as we have seen, there is no power in a license to prevent intemperance. When we give any man a legal permit to sell rum for a sum of money we discriminate between the rich and the poor. A few men being enabled to monopolize the rum-trade does not lessen the drinking and drunk­enness, as they can all be supplied from a few saloons as well as from a larger number. To license the rum traffic is to participate in its results. The saloon-keeper is responsible for the murders committed under the influence of the liquors he sells. The law is also responsible, which has licensed his business. And every man who voted for the law, or for men who would vote for the law, is responsible. No man, therefore, who fears God, can vote for a license law or for any man who will vote for it, seeing that by so doing he becomes a participant in the evils thus encouraged.

LICENSE HINDERS THE EDUCATION WHICH IS NECESSARY TO REMOVE THE CRIME OF DRUNKENNESS.

Men have said, we must have education before legislation. In a sense this is true. And yet it is-true that we never can have the needed educa­tion under a license system. There are many per­sons—I dare say the majority—who judge of the right and wrong of this question by the light in which the law exhibits it. The masses think second-hand, and will not be easily persuaded that the law-makers would have licensed this evil if it were such an unmitigated nuisance as we affirm it to be.

Again: the familiarity of this abomination par­alyzes all opposition against it—

"Vice is a monster of such hideous mien,
That to be hated needs but to be seen;
But seen too oft, familiar with its face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace." A season of cholera sends the country into a tremor of excitement. A few thousands have been carried away in defiance of all medical skill. But the rum-trade may kill sixty thousand per annum, and we pay but little attention to it, be­cause we are accustomed to it. Hence the licens­ing of this traffic binds upon us a custom that has an educating influence in the United States equal to one hundred and sixty thousand schools kept in favor of those vices, out of which we expect a few hundred men to bring the people by goodish lectures on the evils of drunkenness. While we are trying to educate the people, on one hand, to total abstinence and prohibition, on the other, we are employing a billion every year to teach them just the opposite. The cost of all temperance effort in the United States for 1877, including the work done by clergymen, was not more than ten million dollars, while the wholesale cost of rum was nearly seven hundred and fifty millions; or, for every dollar we expended to teach the people that intemperance was wrong, we paid seventy-five to teach that the use of these drinks, as a beverage, is right and legal. And yet, men of thought on other matters will continue to talk of education before legislation! To me it is inconsistent, not to say hypocritical, for a man to preach that the use of alcohol as a beverage is wrong, and then to vote that it is right and lawful. It is like pray­ing that all who profess faith in Christ may be one, and then laboring to keep the divisions that now exist, or like confessing the Lord in words and then denying him in works. If, then, we do really favor education, we must employ the object les­sons of the law. On this subject, B. Gratz Brown, in one of his speeches, presents my view so well that I can do no better than copy it. He says:

"Of twenty-three murders in one year, in Phila­delphia, twenty came of drink. Of 75,692 arrests in New York City, 34,696 were for drunkenness and dis­order.

"In fact, all the annals of penitentiaries, houses of correction and jails, but confirm what you see so patent in daily police reports, that intoxication and crime go hand in hand down the slippery paths to perdition. And this moral leprosy is contagious, constantly spreading, making its conscription younger every generation. But the blunted moral sense which breeds dishonesties among individuals, when brought into contact with the State, turns its employ into rings of plunder and com­binations for spoils. Those who have witnessed the growth, in late years, of the sentiment that robbery of the State is no robbery unless discovered, will not need to be told that it finds its culmination in that organized association known as the lobby, whose trade is corrup­tion; whose appliance is human weakness, and whose Bible is the bottle.

"The effect, however, of this open traffic in intox­icating drinks is visible in the morals of public thought long before it takes on any violent types of depravity. What the State licenses, the community will persist in regarding as right. Thus all reverence for law is under­mined in those who still believe it wrong, and all faith in morals is shaken with such as stickle for the law; so that obedience to authority, which constitutes good cit­izenship, finds itself embarrassed either in accepting or repudiating legalized intoxication. Indeed, it goes much further; for we have thus the State as a teacher of morals, inculcating, by way of a first lesson, that the be­ginnings, whether of virtue or vice, are, in its estimation, matters of indifference. How early the seeds of dis­obedience are sown by such teaching may be well shown from reports of the Boston public schools, where, by careful inquiry, it has been shown that ’among the causes for truancy, that which so far transcends all others as to be considered the cause of causes, is the early use of intoxicating drinks.’ Such is the attesta­tion of Mr. Philbrick, for so many years superintendent. If to this be added the educating influence of the dram shops, for they are the rendezvous of riper profligates ambitious to encourage the young to emulate their courses, some idea may be formed of the antagonism thus interposed to any higher moral and physical de­velopment. Even if the great object of government, then, was merely the suppression of crime, without other or nobler purposes, does it not sap the very foundations of its strength and permanence by sanctioning the license system? Is it not equally fatal, as a policy of State, to the governing and the governed?

"And here I might properly rest this analysis, were it not that there is one great element of society which re­volves in a sphere, of its own, and is scarcely to be classified under either of these aspects. I mean the families of the people—the centers of domestic rather than public life. The dram-shops law is not merely a menace; it is a crime against the marriage ties.

"The State first licenses the sale of intoxicating liquors, and then declares habitual intoxication cause for divorce. This is separation made easy; and ninety-nine cases out of every hundred which occur in our courts rest on that ground. It is not the question here whether drunkenness be sufficient cause; but if it is, how can the government excuse itself for upholding and legalizing the traffic which causes drunkenness? And where one family is thus dissolved by a legal edict, how many thousands upon thousands die out, or are virtually destroyed, which make no outward sign? It is in the heart of the mother and the terror of the child that this dread visitant first finds recognition. It is over ruined hopes, and broken promises, and lost respect, and wounded love, that drunkenness invades the family, and when once there, it is only a question of how long before every affection which binds that family together will be trampled out of being. And the future of citi­zenship is thus accursed before it is born into time." THE CIVIL DAMAGE CLAUSE The civil damage clause has some to advocate its claims. This law would license the sale of intoxicants, and then attempt to make the vender responsible for the damage that he shall do while in the use of these legal liberties. On this idea we may license a man to steal, but make him responsible in those cases in which he is caught. It would be far better for mankind to license the horse-thief, for he is a far better man than the saloon-keeper, and does much less harm. He makes property to change hands without the owner’s consent, but he does not waste the time of two millions of men, nor does he intoxicate or otherwise deprave the people. Of course we could catch him in his tricks occasionally, and then the former owner would only lose the time and work of his horse, and his own time in getting him. The civil damage clause, with licensing the rum-trade, is inoperative. No one wishes to file the complaint at the time that the damage is being done. It is when a man is being initiated into the habit of drinking that the work of ruin takes place. At such a time, however, if a saloon­keeper should be sued at law for damages, he would have nothing to pay. The law protects him in his mischief till he has ruined his victim. Then, the wife, or sister, or mother, when driven to the verge of insanity and desperation, files the complaint. She has no means to prosecute her cause, and no influence in the court. If, however, she should be successful, only one or two thou­sand will be awarded. Is this the price of blood? Is this what will satisfy the heart-broken wife?

We have certainly reached these conclusions: