Personal Liberty by Euph.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 10, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 18.

Personal Liberty

By Euph.

THE folly of the license system reminds me of Bridget, who had been told by her mistress to scrub the kitchen floor. Opening the door a while afterward, she found Bridget with the water two or three inches deep, and mopping for dear life, while the water still flowed from the faucet.

“Why don’t you turn off the faucet, Bridget?” exclaimed the lady.

“Sure, ma’am, it’s meself that hasn’t toime, the water kapes me a-moppin’ so fast.”

It is said that in some insane asylums this same idea is utilized to find out whether patients that have been improving are sufficiently sane to be allowed to go home. They take them to a close room with a bare floor, turn on the faucet, and give them a mop, and tell them to mop it dry. If they have sense enough to be allowed to go home they turn off the faucet at once. If not, they mop away until taken to their ward again. Whenever the time comes that we are really sane, we will turn off the faucet of this traffic. How silly it is for us to go mopping away with missions and orphan asylums and Keeley cures—and be content with that—when we have it within our power to turn off the whole tide of drunkenness, disease, and crime by abolishing the traffic itself!

O, but, you say, you must not violate personal liberty. How incongruous seems this cry of personal liberty from the lips of the saloon-keeper! As another has well said, if liberty has fallen so low that her defenders are the class of men who debauch the manhood, the womanhood, and the civilization of this country, God pity liberty!—Euph.