Temperance by Rev. Herrick Johnson

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 12, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 23.

Temperance.

By Rev. Herrick Johnson

Delusions of High License.

HIGH license gilds the traffic with a certain air of respectability. And behind gilded vice the most danger lurks. The more outwardly respectable you make the saloon, the worse you make it. The assault upon morals and manhood is then subtle, insidious, treacherous. It is not your open, outrageous, infamous sinners that do the most harm. A blatant, boasting Ingersoll is far less potent for mischief than a wily and ingenious skeptic, wearing the guise of Christianity only to betray it. So it is not the besotted and loathsome drunkard, swinging from his drinks to the gutter, and crawling from the gutter back again to his drinks, who tempts wayward feet to the folly and filth of intoxication. The saloons that keep up appearances, that put on a pretense of virtue, that claim to be decent in conduct and law-abiding—it is these that play the mischief with our young men.

High license tends to give them the guise of respectability. Five hundred or one thousand dollars paid to the Government for the privilege of doing a certain thing, gives to the one doing it a kind of dignity, and inevitably stamps the thing done as business of some considerably increased importance and worth. High license may possibly, though only temporarily, wipe out a few low doggeries. But it gilds the saloons it authorizes. It gives them gloss and outward decency: Not one inherent evil of the traffic is smitten by it. On the contrary, it places over the whole brood of evils a broader brand of legitimacy. And painting vice, we all know, is bad business. To give respectability to an iniquitous thing is to buttress it more securely. Reform by that road is down-hill. Revenue gotten on such terms—the blood of duped and betrayed victims will cry from the ground against it.

High license induces the saloon-keepers to resort to other evils to make good their loss by it. They are going to get back their license fee. That thousand dollars must come back into their till. They have not gone into this business on philanthropic principles, for the good of society. They will therefore adulterate their liquors. They will vitiate their stock. Ah! if they would only water it—literally, water it! But water is the last thing they or their patrons want in it. There is no sting in water. Nothing to bring the drinker back to his glass. So they ply the stock with cheap drugs. They swell its dimensions. They make its bulk large by their vile decoctions. And it finds its way down men's throats at ten cents a glass, smooth and pleasant to the sense, only to prove at last the very poison of death, often making of men physical and moral wrecks, shattering nerves, stealing away brains, and deadening conscience.

But this is not all. Under the pressure of high license, and to make the establishment pay back that large fee, saloon-keepers are tempted to introduce other features, to marshal other forms of vice, and to link gambling and harlotry with liquor-selling, so as to swell the receipts.

And this is no wild guess or foolish outburst of temperance fanatics. It is the frank statement of our enemies, and out of their own mouths shall they be condemned. Last autumn the State Protective Liquor Association of Illinois held its annual meeting at Quincy. And the report of the Executive Committee boldly charged that there were "men in the traffic with whom the sale of liquors is only a blind for the gambling-houses and houses of prostitution, and who did not hesitate to advocate high license in the hope of ruining the poor but decent saloon-keepers, and thereby attracting custom to their own establishments." If men will not hesitate to advocate high license on that ground, men will not hesitate to garnish their saloons with games and lewd women to make high license pay. Carrying up the license fee, therefore, may gild with an outside respectability, while inside the way is often made two-fold more a way of hell.—Rev. Herrick Johnson.