p. 701 | Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 16, 1888

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 14, No. 44.

Health and Temperance.

THE RIGHT PLACE FOR A SALOON.

WHERE is the right place for a saloon? Where is the saloon wanted? If not the fashionable mercantile establishment, what other kinds of business are likely to be helped by the proximity of gin-mills? Let some one name them. Is it the baker, the tailor, the shoemaker, the butcher, the milliner, the bookseller? Do any of these find it any particular advantage to their trade to have a grog-seller come and open shop beside them? What surroundings are necessary in order to justify the opening of resorts for loafers, of drunkard-mills, of dens for the propagation of vice and crime? What neighborhoods shall be selected for the establishment of places for the debauchment and ruin of men, for the destruction of families, for the making of paupers and felons? Which is worse—to open a saloon within two hundred feet of a church or a school, or to open one next door to a home, in front of a home, over a home, or under a home? What is there that should make a grog-shop a stench in the nostrils of the public on one street and a sweet-smelling savor on another? What should make it an ugly blot on the landscape in one locality and a thing of beauty in another? Is a saloon on Fifth Avenue calculated to do greater harm than a beer-dive on Mulberry Street? If the wealthy and the powerful cannot endure the presence of the grog-shop, will they help to thrust them on the poor and the weak? Are the tenement districts—the homes of those who are already deep down in poverty, squalor, and misery—are these the proper places to set the saloons? Are they needed here to help men live purer lives, to make happier homes, to strengthen the weak, to cheer the downcast, to guide the erring? Who shall take upon himself the responsibility of declaring where the people shall be cursed with the presence of the grog-shops and where they shall not be cursed? These, it seems to us, are practical questions, and we should like to have them answered.—New York Observer.