WHAT HAVE THE SALOONS DONE?
By Chauncey Hobart, D.D.
1. THEY have taxed the people many thousands of dollars to build jails, enlarge courthouses, and provide for the needy. 2. They have largely increased the taxes for the support of the poor, and to bury those who have died. 3. They have largely increased municipal expenses for boarding criminals, and for trying them in our courts. 4. They have caused many thousands of murders—thus hurrying men, unprepared, into eternity, leaving orphans to weep and kindred to mourn in hopeless sorrow. 5. They have snatched young men from what might have been honorable life, and consigned them to the penitentiary. 6. They have hurried thousands of our fellow-citizens into untimely graves, who would have been, in all probability, but for the saloon and the drink habit, valuable citizens and respectable members of the community. 7. They have made poor men poorer, and rich men richer and meaner. 8. They have taken the bread out of the hands and mouths of poor, hungry, starving children, and left them to suffer and die. 9. They have taken the money that should have been used to furnish decent clothing for hard-working women, and left those women to toil and suffer in rags. 10. They have disregarded the tears and agony of women whose lives have been wrecked, and whose hearts have been broken by the saloon business. 11. They have pursued with relentless persistence the poor, stupid, idiotic drinker, until his body has been consigned to a drunkard's grave, and his soul to a drunkard's hell. 12. But by far the worst effect produced by the saloons of these United States is the stupefying, benumbing, narcotizing influence which they have produced, and are still exercising, on the moral sense of many in the community. This is seen in the case of those who are ready to tolerate the saloon for the sake of the money it brings into the municipal treasury. We have, say, twenty saloons in a city of 8,000 inhabitants, which pay $500 each, making $10,000. This, they say, builds our sewers, paves our gutters, cleans our streets, repairs our sidewalks, pays our city officials, and greatly reduces our city taxes; and hence saloons are voted for by professed Christians, and men who are supposed to fear God.299But is it true that this ten thousand dollars reduces the city taxes? Not a bit of it. It costs the city say $20,000 per annum to meet all demands, and this ought, in equity, to be paid by the citizens in proportion to the property owned by each. If Mr. A, who owns $100 worth of property, should pay ten cents, Mr. B, who is worth $1,000, should pay one dollar; Mr. C, who is worth $10,000, should pay ten dollars; Mr. D, who is worth $100,000, should pay one hundred dollars. This is fair and right, as all must admit, and if $20,000 was raised in this way, no one would have a right to complain. The money would be raised, the city government would go on, and each would pay in proportion to the protection afforded. But when the half of this $20,000 is paid for license to sell intoxicating liquors, the change is not in the amount collected, but in the mode of collecting it, and in the persons who pay it. In this last case he who should have paid one hundred dollars now pays but fifty dollars, while the poor dupe of the drink habit, who should not have paid more than ten cents, now pays anywhere from twenty dollars to one hundred dollars, through the saloon keeper, into the treasury. —California Christian Advocate.