WHY COMPROMISE WITH THE SALOON?
By G.
Many well-meaning people think that striking the Sunday saloon is a great stroke of temperance policy. But a great deal of earnest energy is wasted in such a crusade, because it is based on a false theory. It supposes that a bad thing is worse on Sunday than it is on any other day; and this is what leads multitudes of people to think that they can violate the law of God in ordinary life six days in the week and atone for it by a formal cessation of activity on Sunday. And the majority of religious people (Sunday observers) act as if they accepted the atonement. This principle operates in every other line of secular life as well as in the saloon business; and it is at the bottom of every law designed to enforce any degree of Sunday observance. There is no such thing as temperance in sin; for sin is sin, wherever and whenever committed. Saloon-keeping is a sin, for the Lord has pronounced a wo against it. Hab. 2:15. Then the special appeal to have it stopped on Sunday, is a logical concession that it is legitimate on the other six days of the week, and is a practical indulgence to the rumseller to sin on all days except Sunday. The saloon is uncivil, a menace to the good order and safety of the community. It is a constant allurement from a state of sobriety to a condition that incites crime. It is the direct cause of more than three-fourths of all the expense of the police force and the police court. As a source of public revenue, it costs, directly and indirectly, many times more than it contributes. The revenue of iniquity is as much a curse to the municipality as it is to the individual. “Wo to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity.” When the saloons are closed on Sunday, the crusade against them as a general evil is apt to stop. Then the saloon-keepers, in their imputed virtue (the real revenge), set up a crusade against the marts of legitimate business, and the temperance effort is turned into a campaign for enforced Sunday observance. The advocates of mere Sunday closing of the saloon have the cart before the horse. If they will labor to annihilate the institution altogether, the Sunday saloon will fall with the rest. Prohibition—not regulation by legal acknowledgement of respectability—is the only consistent warfare against the saloon evil. To compromise with sin is sin; to make terms with incivility is uncivil. Why do otherwise good temperance workers propose compromises with that which is evil and only evil? G.