Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 19, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 44.

Health and Temperance.

Benefits of Prohibition.

It is a poor time to decry prohibition when it is working so successfully in Maine and Canada and the West and the South. Maine has given it a full trial, and is so well satisfied with it that it puts the principle in its constitution by the handsome majority of nearly 50,000; and as the years pass and the law gets firmer grip of the traffic in the cities and larger towns, this majority will grow. Every day proves prohibition to be the great conservator of peace and prosperity. Similar testimony is coming already from Iowa. When the State adopted prohibition a year or two ago, some of the wiseacres predicted that business would decline and prosperity take wings. The saloon, they contended, helps business, and makes trade move. There would be vacant shops and houses, silent mills and deserted villages, as the result of driving out the enterprising saloons. How is it in the capital city? Let the Iowa State Register answer:—

“Let any man who scoffs at prohibition and its material good, go about Des Moines to-day, even this early, and locate the former sites of saloons—sites then occupied by old shanties, and rented by saloon-keepers who employ no clerks and no help, and who robbed laboring men and their families daily of their earnings—and then compare the same properties, their value to the city and to society, with the large brick blocks erected on them in the last two seasons, or since the prohibitory law went into effect, and inspect the business now being carried on on the same sites, the character of the business, the amount of capital invested to carry it on, adding so largely to the taxable wealth of the city, and the value of better-paid employment, and then let him answer the question himself, which is best for the city, these brick blocks and the new stores, and the large employment given by the new stores, or the old, rotten shanties and the saloons in them that used to be?”

This material improvement is the least of the benefits Des Moines is receiving from the closing up of the saloons. More than half of the temptations to crime and immorality have been removed with the rum-shop, and nobody can tell how much domestic happiness has been increased in hundreds of families. Prohibition is coming, and it is coming to stay. Let distillers, brewers, and dealers take notice, and betake themselves to honorable employments.—N. Y. Independent.