Temperance by National Baptist

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 9, 1882

Temperance.

By National Baptist

A Tilt on Prohibition.

OUR friend Jimmy Riggs keeps a hotel, as you may know already; but he sells no liquor. To his credit be it spoken. Of course his run of custom is very small. One or two travelers at a time is as much as he looks for. Yesterday, there came along here a dry-goods bummer making his way across the country to Tidiout. The bummer is a thirsty man, and missed his evening beverage. He was out on the shingle-pile after supper, taking part in the chat. He could not forbear grumbling at the narrow-mindedness and intolerance of the people in not allowing liquor to be sold. He spoke as if his rights had been infringed upon, whereupon Dea. Thresher, who is acquainted with him, in a good-natured, but blunt way, went at him.

“Hold on, neighbor, hold on. There are some rights on both sides of this question. People who make liquor and drink liquor are sensitive about their own rights, but are very indifferent to the rights of the people who don’t drink.

“Now you say you have a perfect right to drink if you want to, and even to get drunk if you want to. Well, considered as theory, no man has a right to commit a crime even against himself. Self-murder is an awful crime, even if no one in the world were affected by your being a drunkard but yourself.

“However, as a matter of fact, nobody does interfere with a man’s alleged right to drink. People let him drink himself into bestiality, into a prison, or into a madhouse, or into his coffin, and don’t interfere with him. So, now, I would not interfere with you in your drinking.

“But I have a word to say about other people’s rights. Granted, for the sake of argument, that you have a right to harm yourself. You have no right to harm your neighbors while doing so. One man’s right is bounded by another man’s right. If I should dig a deep pit along-side of your house, even though on ground of my own, and should cause your wall to tumble in, the law would hold me responsible for the damage. I would have to pay it, and couldn’t help myself. It wouldn’t do for me to say, ‘I had a right to dig a pit where I chose on my own ground.’ If I should leave a cellar-door open on a sidewalk, and a passer-by should fall in and break his arm, I would have to pay for that, too. I have no right to leave cellar-doors open as a trap for other people.

“Now, when you open a saloon, you may say that it is for your own convenience. You say you want a place at which to get your liquor. Well, get your liquor, and make a fool of yourself, if you choose. But, how about the boys and the young men in the neighborhood who haven’t learned to drink? Have the fathers and mothers of those boys no right to have their children protected? When you open your trap-door, you are not the only one who goes in. Others will go in there, who otherwise would never have thought of such a thing. And it will be the ruin of them. Yet you make an outcry if one complains of you. Parents are expected to see the pride of their homes, and what should be the honor and stay of their old age, turned into tipplers and drunkards, in order that you may have a rum-hole convenient for our own use. What a pity it is that we hadn’t some Antonio on the judicial bench, to say to you, as was said to Shylock, ‘Take your pound of flesh, but not one drop of Christian blood.’ Take your right to drink, as you call it; but don’t debauch one pure-minded youth, at the peril of all you have got.

“And, further, I deny your right to tax me, in order that your saloon-keepers may get rich. I am taxed, and every man in the community is taxed, to pay the losses and expenses brought on by rum-selling. We build great almshouses; and you fill them with beggared widows and orphans; and we have to support them. You make criminals, and we have to enlarge our jails and build new penitentiaries to hold them all. We have to increase the number of our insane asylums, in order to accommodate the number of poor, crazed men and women that you are making, from year to year. One-half of the criminal expenses of our court are purely and solely on your account. There, for example, was that poor fellow who was hung, not long ago, over in the next county. He was a quiet man, except when he was crazed by drink. He went into a rum-saloon one day, as quiet and peaceable as any man could be. The saloon-keeper soon had him drunk. He kept on his drunk a week, and got through with it only by committing murder on a neighbor and friend. Then there was the long trial; and, finally, another one in another county. At last he was hung. The counties had to pay some thousands of dollars; and I had to help my share. While that poor fellow was standing on the scaffold, and the County Treasurer was entering on his book the charges, which we all afterward had to pay, lo, and behold, the saloon-man was sitting quietly behind his counter, enjoying his pipe, without a word of rebuke from judge or court or private citizen.

“And so I do object to the heavy bills you men bring upon the county. Talk of the revenue that comes in through the liquor tax. You are always harping on that strain. It’s all twaddle. The wonder to me is that so many people are fooled by it. You put in a dime and take out a dollar. That’s true of the whole business from Maine to California. If the country would allow a syndicate of bankers to tax them the amount of loss and expense known absolutely to have been incurred during the past year by the use of liquor, they could afford every year to pay into the public treasury every cent of the revenue that comes from the liquor traffic. That being done, they would get rich faster than did the owners of the big bonanza. I will not admit the right of the rum-seller to put his hand into the pocket of the poor inebriate, and filch from him his few remaining hard-earned dimes; and forever will I protest against his having any right to put his hand into the pockets of the rest of the community, to pay the damages that come from his drinking-saloon. If I were to pursue a business which inflicted continual losses upon other people, it would be but a little while before I would be before the courts. If I enjoyed setting off fireworks, and burnt down a neighbor’s house, I would soon be sought after by a policeman. There is no reason why you men who deal in liquor should not meet the evil consequence of your business; just as other men have to meet the evil consequence of theirs.”—National Baptist.