The Evils of the Liquor Traffic
By Editor
The following remarkable utterance is from the Catholic Review of September 21, 1889:— “The liquor men held their convention recently in Rochester, and submitted to the public a series of resolutions which show that they have not learned more from experience than the prohibitionists. They talked like men who owned the earth, and advanced their ideas without the shyness and modesty of a class whose business is purely disreputable, not from any intrinsic defects, but because the liquor men have made it so. Their strenuous and successful efforts to sell beer, wine, and liquors could not be wisely resisted if they had determined on selling good beer, good wine, and good liquor.” With the first part of this paragraph we have no particular fault to find. The facts are probably correctly stated. But have the liquor men made the business of selling intoxicating liquors to be used as beverages “disreputable?” has not the business rather made many who are engaged in it disreputable? The Lord regarded the business of making drunkards as disreputable a great many years ago, and gave through the prophet Habakkuk this testimony concerning it: “Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!” Hab. 2:15. “Good” beer, “good” wine, and “good” liquor make men drunken; and after all it is the alcohol which these liquors contain that produces all the evils of the traffic. Take the alcohol out of beer, wine, and other liquors and nobody would drink them: it is the alcohol that fires the brain, dethrones the reason, and degrades men below the brutes. The efforts of saloon men to sell these liquors are not always wisely resisted, but they should not only be wisely but persistently resisted.