Destroy the Destroyer

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 1, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 34.

Destroy the Destroyer

If you had admitted into your household, and sumptuously supported, one who you thought was a friend, but who years afterward was demonstrated to be the worst enemy of your family — physically, mentally, morally — would you be doing wrong to cast him out?

Granted that he had beautified his apartments gorgeously in your ample, hospitable home, and that he called apartments and furnishing his, you know that it all came from you, that he is entitled to none of it. Much of it was blood-money sucked by the vampire from the hearts of your children. Every consideration of justice and fatherhood would demand that the destroyer of your home be destroyed.

But, reader, that is what the liquor traffic is to California, to New York, to Oregon, to Washington, to the United States, to the world.

A mighty whine goes up from the liquor dealer, that it is unjust to destroy his business. From men who have not thought it out and thought it through, the whine is echoed in a plea for compensation to this destroyer of property and men and women and homes. "You must not put men out of business, you must not destroy this liquor business, which runs into multi-millions."

But look at the men, the businesses, that the liquor business has destroyed, the men it has put out of work, the women it has ruined physically and morally, the homes it has wrecked, the criminals it has made, the mighty pit in whose abysmal depths so many dead hopes are buried. Look at these and a thousand other broods of evil spawned in the fertile, reeking vat of the liquor business.

Is it wrong to put out of business that business which has destroyed more businesses, and put more men out of business, than anything else save death, whose chief lieutenant the liquor business is?

The verdict ought to be, Put out of business forever the business which puts so many out of business.

Destroy the destroyer.