p. 205 | Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 13.

Health and Temperance.

"PERSONAL LIBERTY."

THE Toledo Blade has well said that the plea of "personal liberty" as an excuse for the saloon is an assumption of the proposition that because the State cannot follow a man who is morally a weakling, and prevent him from ruining himself, it must allow the institution which is his tempter, which gives him the means of self-ruin, an open opportunity to make him a wreck. When a man drops into the vice of drinking, he has his own peril before his eyes, and assumes the risk; but the saloon keeper is not to be interfered with, because, forsooth, he makes money by the self-ruin of this moral weakling, who deliberately takes a risk he knows to be dangerous. The man who is willing to be a drunkard is one man; the man who helps him to the means, in order to make money, is another. The right, if any exists, of the first to be a drunkard, stops with himself; it carries with it no right for another man to aid him, to the peril of society, to the aid of vice and crime. The day is swiftly drawing on when the occupation of furnishing the means and opportunity of a personal vice that is so notoriously fruitful in crime will be stopped by the law's strong hand; when the State will stop the distillery, the brewery, the saloon.