The Liquor Traffic

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 7, 1882

The Liquor Traffic

"I sell liquor for a living. I must live." If a man must live like a shark, swallowing the substance of others, he must take the chances of a shark. It is a question whether or not there is absolute necessity for such a man to live. If he voluntarily starves to death because he is too lazy to do anything but sell rum, then let prohibition make a martyr of him. A counterfeiter must live, but his boarding-house will be the State Prison if he is detected and proved guilty of tampering with the currency of the country. Is it not a greater crime to make counterfeit men than it is to make counterfeit money? The traffic in rum dilutes the pure gold of manhood and stamps the victim with the spurious mint mark that resembles humanity while in reality it cannot be trusted. There is honorable work for honest hands, and there is no valid excuse for selling what Robert Hall called "liquid fire and distilled damnation" for a living; and a license written on paper or parchment will be a poor attenuated shield to hold up on the grand day of assize to keep off the arrows of Almighty wrath.