An Old Dodge | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 4, 1886

An Old Dodge.

THAT veteran temperance worker, Rev. Dr. Cuyler, of Brooklyn, gives an account of a visit to Portland, Me., made last summer, from which we extract a small portion showing the devices to which liquor men resort in order to make it appear that legislation against the business is all a failure. It argues a weak cause when such means are employed to give it strength. Doctor Cuyler says:—

“Last summer I went to Maine. I remember the time when my beloved old friend, General Dow—who a few days ago reached his eighty-first birthday—and myself rode through the streets of that beautiful city in which he rode as a conqueror. He said, ‘My friend Cuyler, there is not an open dram-shop to-day in Portland; both distilleries are down.’ That was thirty-four years ago. The world has been disputing again and again: ‘Is the law a failure or a success in Portland?’ The first night I was in Portland last August, I went down into the most suspicious and ill-conditioned streets about the docks. I kept my eyes open sharply and looked into every suspicious place, and I came back without having found a solitary establishment in which strong drink was visible. There were lots of bottles marked ‘brandy’ and ‘gin,’ and several such very intelligible mottoes, but every one was colored water. Do you suppose any one of those men would have been fool enough to have bottles marked in that way if he intended to sell intoxicating liquors? I saw several of those bottles afterwards at the sheriff’s headquarters, and they were colored water put up for their own purposes, part of the argument being that strangers and verdant visitors such as myself might go away and say, ‘Why, the thing is as public and transparent as it is in New York.’”—Sabbath Recorder.