THE SALOON CURSE by R. F. Coyle

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 16, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 36.

THE SALOON CURSE.

By R. F. Coyle

I MARVEL sometimes that we are so silent in the presence of its deadly work. Day by day, night by night, year after year, it goes on grinding out its grists of woe, drawing into its hopper our sons, our brothers, our husbands, our fathers, yea, even our daughters, and we never raise a hand to stop the awful mill. One hundred thousand a year are crushed between its upper and nether millstones, and sent into the drunkard's eternity, and yet even our churches

SCARCELY RAISE A VOICE

in protest. I marvel at it. Evils that are remote, that are hidden away behind political economy and hard to understand, we strike at and denounce and portray with stirring and affecting eloquence, but this most tangible and conspicuous and destructive evil of all, we ignore. I especially wonder that our workingmen, who are pleading so earnestly for a removal of social wrongs, and saying so many cutting and truthful things about man's inhumanity to man, should be so blind to the unspeakable curse of the saloon. It has been estimated that in Great Britain the liquor traffic gets about one-fourth of their wages. How much goes into its coffers from this source in America I am not prepared to say, but its receipts are certainly enormous.

The workingmen do not realize it, and one is in danger of stirring up their antagonism if he ventures to speak along this line. It is an indictment, a home thrust, which they do not relish. It lays much of the blame for their condition at their own door, and that is never pleasant. To attack the other man is always a vast deal easier than to see

FAULTS IN OURSELVES.

It is the easiest thing in the world to inveigh against capital, but to condemn our own lack of thrift is hard. I have often noticed that in locating responsibility we nearly always look abroad. It never occurs to us that the difficulty may be at home. No class of men has any monopoly of this peculiarity of human nature. We find it in all directions. It belongs to workingmen as well as to others. I am not here to take sides, or to run up the flag of any party, or to flatter my fellow-men of any grade or condition with honeyed phrases, or to curry favor with high or low, with rich or poor, but, in God's name, to speak the truth as I see it.

I have been among workingmen a great deal; I have carefully noted their habits, and in no circle of society have I seen so much reckless and wicked waste. Thousands of them spend their earnings in the most thoughtless and extravagant fashion. I have seen them in the iron and copper mines of Michigan, making from five to eight dollars a day when times were good, but when the reaction came, and many of the mines and mills closed up, these very men were on the verge of starvation. Instead of putting by something for a rainy day, they spent their money in the saloon and in beer gardens and in places of that sort. There they passed their evenings and their Sundays,

THROWING AWAY THEIR WAGES

with utmost unconcern. Had they lived economically, and opened up a savings account, they might have been independent when the mines began to suspend here and there, but as it was, a week's idleness was enough to bring them to want and beggary. The saloon got their cash and society their complaints. They gave their money to the rumseller and their maledictions to capital. And that is a good deal more common than many are willing to admit.

Nobody knows better than myself how multitudes of our workingmen, even when times are best, have to pinch and scrimp at every point to keep soul and body together. Many of them are driven to an economy that is most beggarly. I know that, and so do you. But that does not at all invalidate what I have just said about how thoughtlessly thousands upon thousands of them waste their earnings in the saloon and kindred places. Go into Pittsburg, or Chicago, or Minneapolis, or any of our great manufacturing cities, and you invariably find the saloons most numerous in those sections where the workingmen live and labor. This is a fact which cannot be controverted, and the significance of it ought not to escape our attention.

Does it not show that the rum power knows very well where its best customers are? Build a factory or open up a mine anywhere out in the country to-morrow, and there will be a saloon there before sunset. I wonder that the workingmen and their champions of press and platform do not give the matter some serious consideration.—Rev. R. F. Coyle, of Oakland.