p. 12 | I Did Not Intend To Do It

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 14, 1907

“I Did Not Intend To Do It”

The above exclamation was uttered by a man in Dallas one Saturday night at the police prison when told that the fatal bullet from his pistol had resulted in the death of a former friend with whom he had just had an altercation in a barroom. After giving utterance to it, he clasped his hands and moaned piteously as he paced his cell and continued to cry out, “My God, is it possible? I have been praying that he might not die. I would a thousand times rather change places with him than be as I am. I have the blood of another man on my hands, and I am a ruined man!” Some distance, in another part of the city, sat a poor woman, his wife, and three children, deploring the fact that her husband and their father had taken the life of a fellow man and was in jail, stamped with the brand of a murderer. And just a few blocks away there wailed a broken-hearted widow, as her six children wept and refused to be comforted because there was a bloody corpse lying in a saloon—all that remained of a husband and father. Such is a record in part of the closing hours of the last Saturday in the year 1905 in the city of Dallas. What caused this tragedy?—Red liquor! Where did it occur?—In one of the saloons in the city! Both men ought to have been at home with their families; but instead of this they were in the liquor resort throwing dice for drinks. A trivial dispute arose, angry words followed, then came blows, and the crack of the deadly pistol put the climax to the altercation. A few moments before, they were in friendly converse, but a drink or two more of liquor turned the friends into deadly enemies, profanity and wicked epithets were hurled, and the pistol did the rest. Yet we are told that the best way to regulate the saloon is to license it and give it a monopoly of drunkenness, vice, immorality, and crime. May be so; but every day adds to the list of murders perpetrated by this demon of iniquity. The saloon is the meeting place for men where their wicked passions are aroused, their thirst for blood stimulated, and where their deeds of diabolism are consummated.

We are often told that, “If you let whisky alone, it will let you alone.” A more colossal falsehood never found articulate utterance. The wife and three children of the man who did this killing, and the wife and six children of the man killed, did not touch the accursed stuff. They never went about the saloon in their lives. Yet two women and nine innocent children are the real victims of the saloon. The man who did the killing suffers agony for his deed; while the dead man is beyond the suffering of this world; but eleven other people are heart-broken and refuse to be comforted. They are the ones who suffer most, and they suffer for the sins of the open saloon. Really, it is the people who let liquor alone who suffer the greatest agony because of its deeds of violence.

But the foregoing incident is only one of the hundreds that occur every year of the world. The saloon is the prolific soil, out of which spring up into the rankest growth murders, vices, immoralities, heartaches, and desolate homes. For more than fifty years it has glutted our appetite with blood and shame. It has brought about a condition in which murder is respectable, and murderers lift up their heads as honored citizens. It is next to impossible to justify and fully punish the man who takes his neighbor’s life. And the reason for it is that the barroom has made murder so common that nobody seems to attach any importance to the crime. When it is committed, we are shocked for the time being; but it passes from our thought, the murderer is vindicated by the courts, and the thing becomes a closed incident to the community. Yet we have a maudlin sentiment that the saloon is one of our leading institutions, that it must be protected by law, and that those who oppose it are narrow-minded and fanatical. But the saloon has almost filled up the cup of its iniquity, and the time is approaching when its death-knell will be sounded. Justice moves slowly, but it moves surely.—Texas Advocate.