Untitled article by Chas. S. Morris

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · July 16, 1896

WHY WE SHOULD HAVE PROHIBITION ON ALL DAYS.

By Chas. S. Morris

[From the Prize Oration delivered by Chas. S. Morris at the Prohibition Convention, Pittsburg, May 26.]

Two years ago we had a fit of national hysterics, because Coxey's weaponless petition in boots tramped from Ohio to Washington; to-day we coolly watch, marching through the land, an army mightier than any general ever marshalled on the battle-field. An army that sways parties, rules city councils, controls legislatures, dominates Congress, dictates to the Supreme Court how to interpret the Constitution, controls the church and gags its pulpit. This army's recruiting station is the club house, its drill ground the bar-room, its barracks the jail, its soldiers' home the poor house, its national cemetery the potters' field, its uniform rags, its step a stagger, its battle-cry rum. This army enlists for life; the promotions are rapid—moderate drinker, hard drinker, drunkard, sot. Every saloon-keeper is a captain, every brewer a colonel, every distiller a general, the devil himself is its commander-in-chief. The continent is at its mercy; it gives no quarter. Attention, stagger forward, march! Rum, rum, rum. Two million five hundred thousand drunkards are on their funeral march; past home, past honor, past hope; over blighted lives of wife and child; over the graves of broken-hearted mothers; down, down to a drunkard's death and a drunkard's hell.

The saloon says it is a profit to the nation; it pays $200,000,000 a year for license; the nation pays $2,000,000,000 for liquor. It returns eight cents of every dollar it is licensed to steal. It also returns 26,000 lunatics, 50,000 paupers, and enough criminals to fill 50 penitentiaries and 2,000 jails. The nation has to pay $5,000,000 to support its lunatics; $10,000,000 for its paupers, $200,000,000 for its criminals. It loses the value of tens of thousands of men slain and hundreds of thousands rendered idle. Has it not a right then to say whether the saloon should be allowed to carry on this lunatic-pauper-criminal manufacturing company? Is the liquor dealer's right to get rich paramount to a drunkard's right to life, to his wife's right to bread and coal, to his child's right to be well born, to the State's right to an uncorrupted suffrage?

You say these evils must stop; but how? The old parties will never stop them: the saloon controls them both. The Democratic Party wept over a billion dollar Congress, but it does not even shed a crocodile tear when the saloon robs paupers of $1,200,000,000. The Republican Party will compass heaven and earth to protect the workingman's dinner pail, yet it permits the saloon to rob him of his dinner without protest. It sees 100,000 pieces of American bone and sinew buried annually by the saloon and it is silent. It will protect things, not men. The nation has a hundred light-houses along her coast, but around the awful rocks of intemperance, on which unnumbered lives have been beaten out, she has nothing but licensed pirates. Neither the Republican nor Democratic captain of the Ship of State will pick up a drowning drunkard. . . .

For a century a certain man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho has regularly fallen among thieves. The Republican priest and the Democratic Levite have passed by on the other side. If you want to be a good Samaritan, do not merely take this man to an inn and pay his board, but get your friends and go back along that road determined to arrest the gang of thieves that have been robbing every one that passes down that way. Notify the liquor dealers through the ballot box that the workingman must go from his cottage to his work without passing a single saloon; that is prohibition. The saloon keeper may tell you that prohibition does not prohibit. He is a reliable source of information, isn't he? If prohibition does not prohibit, why is he so bitterly opposed to it? Why has it emptied the jails of Kansas; reduced liquor drinking in Iowa? Why does liquor capital halt at the border of a prohibition State? Why did Maine, after a trial of 30 years, make prohibition a part of her constitution? . . .

Votes were needed for independence in 1776, for union in 1860; they are needed for sobriety, now! Now, when the continent trembles beneath the drunkard's tread—now, when children in their cradles are stung by this viper—now, when it dooms a million women to lonely and unpitied martyrdom.

A river of rum, a mountain of gold, a cloud of tears, a boulevard of broken hearts, a red Niagara, down which the best blood of the nation is pouring, a valley of dry bones, white with a million rum-made skeletons. This is the terrific indictment against this infernal traffic.