p. 216 | High License by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 14.

High License.

By Editor

THE N. Y. Independent says of the high license bill, that “if it becomes a law and is properly enforced, will be a practical power for good.” We believe that the high license movement has done good; for wherever it has been tried, as far as we have yet learned, it has made thorough-going prohibitionists of its strongest advocates. What practical power for good to the cause of morality and temperance high license has been, it would be difficult to show, otherwise than we have stated, that it has made prohibitionists. In the same number of the Independent

in which we find the language quoted above, is a letter from Bishop Hurst, dated Des Moines, Iowa, in which he says:—

“No friend of the saloon wants to pay any money for license; and in some cases the high license actually increases the number of saloons. For example, here in Des Moines, where there were forty-five saloons paying a license of $250, when the license was put up to $1,000 the number of saloons ran up to sixty in six months’ time. It is not possible to give a solution of the fact. I simply state a result which was chronicled from day to day by the leading paper of the State, The State Register.”

This is not a very favorable showing toward its being “a practical power for good.” With all deference to the bishop we think it can be solved. But we waive that and quote yet once more from the Independent, from remarks on high license by Joseph Cook, in the prelude to his Boston lecture, March 10:—

“Constitutional prohibition, like statutory, would drive liquor-selling into obscure and disreputable quarters in cities. On the contrary, high license gilds the saloon. It converts the gin-hole into the gin-palace. It greatly adds to the respectability of the liquor trade. It thus builds up the power that threatens the home and good government.”

We think the editorial in favor of high license in that number of the Independent was pretty effectually neutralized by Bishop Hurst and Joseph Cook. But we must give one more short paragraph from Mr. Cook on the subject of license in general:—

“All license miseducates the people by making the State partner in unrighteous gains. All license of the liquor traffic means State permission to a man, for a consideration, to poison his neighbors, and manufacture drunkards, paupers, criminals, taxes, ruined homes, and lost souls!”

Surely, the people are waking up to the iniquities of the license system. We do not assume to mark out a channel of thought for everybody, but we cannot imagine how a professed Christian, a believer in the Bible, wherein we learn that drunkard-making is soul-destroying, can prefer high license or any license to prohibition.