p. 14 | THE SALOON

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 15, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 46.

THE SALOON.

Is It a Good Thing?

Yes and No.

YES, for the saloon-keeper. YES, for the brewer. YES, for the distiller. YES, for the gambler. YES, for the confidence man. YES, for the hold-up man. YES, for the criminal court lawyer. YES, for ward-boss who gets his weekly rake-off. YES, for yellow-newspaper editor who gets his sensation ready-made there. YES, for the spoilsman, who at the last moment can always defeat civic reform by buying up the saloon's habitues. YES, for the trapper who lives by snaring young men and girls at the wine-room supper. YES, for every brute that, guised in man's garb, goes out to serve his master, the devil, and drags his victims down to the hell he has made for himself.

For these and their like the saloon is a "good thing" eternally.

But—Is The Saloon a Good Thing?

NO, for the man who drinks up his wages there. NO, for the wife whose home is bare of comfort, because of the wages her husband lost there. NO, for the children who breakfast on crusts, and dine on crusts, and go to bed supperless, because their father spent his wages for drink and not for food. NO, for the butcher, who loses the wages the saloon-patron might have spent for steaks and chops. NO, for the baker, who would sell a loaf or two of bread every day to every saloon victim if there was no saloon to tempt him when he went home from work at night. NO, for the shoe-dealer, who would have an average of from two to five new customers for every saloon customer, if the saloon were closed and the drinker spent part of his wages to buy new shoes for his family. NO, for the father whose son begins to sow his wild oats in the high-license "buffet," goes from

bar to barrel-house, and winds up a physical, mental, and moral suicide. NO, for the young woman, who marries the man she loves "to reform him," and finds out too late what hell on earth is like. NO, for the tax-payer who thinks he is getting off easy by making the saloon pay him in license fee from 5 to 10 per cent. of its net proceeds, and forgets to figure up as a part of the debit side: (1) The cost of the police court; (2) Jail; (3) County house; (4) Fires caused by drunken employees; (5) Shrinkage in real estate values in saloon districts; and— (6) The loss to the community of labor of able-bodied men whom the saloon tempts to periodical sprees, or whose drink-undermined health and poverty at length makes a public charge; to say nothing of the boys and girls caught by rum before they are old enough to know better; and the neutralizing of all Christian endeavor by the ever-present, ever-busy influence of its worst enemy.

For these, and for every healthy, wholesome interest of every community, the saloon is NOT a good thing, but a mighty bad thing eternally.

If you believe this, work against it in your town, your state, and your nation every time and in every way.