Breaking the Chains of Slavery
By C. M. S.
THERE has never been any other such dreadful slavery as the slavery of the liquor traffic. The people of every land have felt the merciless grip of its shackles. It has respected neither age, sex, nor condition. It has dealt with the world more pitilessly than the fabled monster of ancient Crete, which devoured his annual tribute of seven youths and seven maidens exacted from Athens, until a Theseus arose and slew the bovine-human monster. That was the ancient Minotaur. But every nation in the world is today paying tribute to a modern Minotaur, less discriminating but far more exacting than anything recorded in ancient legends. Many of the brightest minds of every nation, state, and municipality have been blighted and destroyed by the exactions of that merciless Minotaur that tramples and devours and destroys, but never heals or benefits or restores. The human race has been long tolerant of that death-breathing and ruin-wielding offspring of covetousness and appetite. Is there no Theseus for these days to slay the monster and free the world from its tribute of human beings? They are marching in unbroken lines by day and by night to their doom, thousands on thousands, a fearful array of idiots, imbeciles, lunatics, fratricides, parricides, homicides, tattered tramps, and worthless wrecks of humanity. That is the tribute which this generation of ours is paying to the Minotaur of drink. But it is not the whole tribute; for there is left behind another army whose pitiful condition should excite the sympathy of a Moloch. It is an army in tattered garb, whose eyes are red with weeping, whose cheeks are sunken with want, and whose bodies are wasted with fasting. There are widows with orphaned children, crying for bread and shivering with the cold; there are mothers and fathers with bowed heads and aching hearts, sorrowing over the ruin of their children; there are children shuddering in grief and terror over the loss of a mother slain by the hand of a drink-crazed father; there are defenseless households turned into the7street when drink has sent the wage earner to prison, or robbed him of his ability to earn a living for his family. Who has the right to license such an insatiate monster and turn him loose in the streets of our cities and villages to despoil the people and ruin our loved ones? Is there any price that can compensate us for what we lose? What can rum bring us as an equivalent for what it demands of us? It pours into our laps a few dollars, wet with tears and stained with human blood; but those same dollars were wrung from the people who sought by turning them over to the liquor demon to satisfy an appetite which could not be satisfied—and liquor had created the appetite. Liquor created the appetite, then pays for a license which will permit him to attempt to satisfy it. In the attempt he burns that appetite into the human system deeper than ever, and leads its owner a cringing slave at his chariot wheels. He pays his license, and then flings in our face the wrecks of manhood, womanhood, and childhood which his activity was certain to create. The proposition to license the sale of liquor is the most monstrous proposition that has ever been put before the human race. The cannibal feeds upon human flesh; but the liquor demon devours human souls. We think cannibalism is barbarous; but the licensing of the sale of strong drink by civilized and Christianized communities is worse than barbarous. It is so illogical, so inconsistent, so out of harmony with everything that is true and just and sensible and reasonable and appropriate, that there is no adjective which can adequately describe it. It is the greatest anomaly, the strangest paradox, of modern times. What could a poisonous serpent pay us that we would consider an adequate compensation for the privilege of striking its deadly fangs into the flesh of our son or daughter? But that is exactly the bargain one makes with the liquor demon when he votes to license the sale of strong drink. What could a leopard give us that we would consider a sufficient balm for our conscience in granting it the privilege of springing through the door of our neighbor’s house to slaughter the members of his family? But that is virtually what one does who votes to license the liquor business in any community. As liquor is the instigator of crime, licensing its sale is only another method of licensing crime. As liquor robs men of their efficiency, no matter what their calling, to license its sale is virtually to put a premium upon inefficiency. As liquor brews domestic discord and the severing of family ties, to license its sale is to encourage such discord and put a premium upon divorce. In all the history of its existence, liquor has never touched anything that it did not mar and contaminate and debase. If the genius of the liquor traffic could be shaped into a living creature and made to stalk through the nations with every characteristic faithfully portrayed in soul, in face, in figure, and in purpose, we should see a monster that would strike terror into the souls of men. His eyes are glowing dollars; his heart a festering nest of corruption and greed; his face hideous in every feature, as expressing the debased workings of his intriguing brain; his arms the arms of the devilfish equipped to extract the manhood, the money, and the lifeblood from his victims; his fingers cruel and poisonous hooks to hold and to benumb whomever he may capture; and his breath a blast of flame, withering and burning and destroying everything before him. And if he must tell his name as he strides through the world, we can hear him say: “I am ruin; I am desolation; I am greed; I am dishonor; I am anarchy; I am death.” Could the people see some such demonstration of what the liquor business truly is, they would find some way to put an end to its cruel activities. Some are beginning to see it, the light is beginning to break into many minds, and a way is being found. A State governor with a conscience, when he begins to look upon the wastage and wreckage caused by liquor in his commonwealth, is bound to consider the inconsistency of taking its blood money and permitting the continuation of its ruinous operations. That is why we hear Governor Hanly’s eloquent denunciations of the liquor business. That is why Governor Patterson has joined the ranks of the abolitionists. That is why Governor Foss is a convert to prohibition. That is why eighteen States are now in the “dry” column, and why the leaves of the liquor plant are curling and drying up in many other States. The people are seeing the wicked folly of selling their generation and their own children into the merciless power of a combine that has no other business than to debase and destroy for gain. The New York World, under the heading “A Spreading Drought,” speaks thus:— The “dry” area of the country was appreciably enlarged in the Western local elections. A net gain of three counties in Illinois puts more than half the counties on the side of prohibition. No fewer than thirteen of the sixteen counties voting on the question in Michigan went “dry,” and reduced the “wet” territory to less than half the counties in that State. In Wisconsin the gains were all on the side of no license, the losses all on the other side. Prohibition is now a movement of few setbacks and many advances. Locally it has expanded from town-wide to county-wide decisions, and from county-wide decisions State-wide action is a logical step made the more easy to take. Never before in the United States has the liquor traffic been so widely illegalized as it is today. Where the movement will stop, it is too early to predict. Heretofore prohibition has had many promising starts, only to meet later on with equally strong reactionary forces. But heretofore it has been a movement of impulse and emotionalism, while now it has an increasingly powerful industrial backing, which is mightily strengthened by the war test of Russia, the action of France, and the testimony of official England to the alcoholic impairment of industrial efficiency. A prohibition which is born only of the stress of war may not long outlast the war. But there runs with or without it all a growth of individual temperance which will abide whatever becomes of the effort to impose abstinence upon the unwilling by mere fiat of law. There is a dogged persistency about the present temperance movement that foretells success. The liquor forces take little comfort now in the slogan that “Prohibition does not prohibit.” They never did believe it; and while declaring that “prohibition does not prohibit,” they were fighting it in every locality where they could find it, for fear it might do the thing they declared it could not and would not do. If prohibition is not prohibiting in the districts where it is in force, it is doing something that makes the liquor interests feel just as bad as prohibition would; and the appointment of receivers for breweries and distilleries that are closing down for lack of business shows that something is happening that makes the liquor business feel uneasy. The people are coming to realize that they have been “paying too much for their whistle.” Gov. Eugene Foss of Massachusetts has well expressed it in the following testimony given at a temperance rally in Brookline, Mass., on April 14:— I came to see the necessity for absolute prohibition at the time I was governor of this commonwealth. It was part of my duty to visit the insane asylums. I learned that the State had about 20,000 of such State wards, and for their needs the State had to pay $5,000,000 a year. I came to know that nine tenths of these cases were due to the direct results of alcohol. Then in my industrial plants I found I had to discharge drinking men because there was no possible hope of their ever being able to make good. Night after night their women and children came to my home and begged that the men be reinstated into their jobs. I examined myself. I found I was going out and8voting for the saloon around the corner where these men went to get drunk. I was the one who was indirectly to blame; and I became a convert to the theory and practice of prohibition. I tell you here and now I shall do everything in my power to help make this State prohibition, and this nation prohibition from coast to coast. The nations of Europe are outlawing the drink traffic or curtailing its activities in order that liquor shall not reduce the efficiency of their men in the business of war. Americans are pushing on toward the same goal in order that liquor shall not reduce the efficiency of men in the more helpful and profitable activities of peaceful industry. But from both standpoints the liquor business is a common enemy. And if a period of peace should come to distracted Europe, may it not be that they who have found liquor to be their enemy in war may recognize it also as an enemy in peace, and so outlaw it in peace as well as in war?