BEER AND LEGISLATION

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 28, 1881

BEER AND LEGISLATION.

The following pointed paragraphs are from a lecture by Miss Frances E. Willard, the well-known temperance reformer:—

Does license "regulate?" Let Chicago answer, with her three thousand licensed and three hundred unlicensed dram-shops open on the Sabbath day; with her drunken boys and abandoned girls thronging these haunts of infamy; with her drunkards freely obtaining liquor enough to keep flourishing the crop of arrests for criminal assault; with her jails crowded by murderers, her vile "concert" saloons in violation of an ordinance which declares a penalty for every exhibition of the kind; with her horrid scenes at the police courts, where drunken men and women are sent to the bridewell and jail, but no indictment found against the saloon-keepers, who in open violation of law, sold them the liquor that sent them there, and who will do so again as soon as they can get them back into their clutches. Chicago, with her municipal authorities and executive officers solemnly sworn to enforce the license law, is a suggestive commentary on the comparative excellences of license and prohibitory laws!

"But let us discriminate between the sale of whisky and of beer," is the specific offered by some well-meaning people. The duke of Wellington was of this number, and thought he had won a greater victory than Waterloo when he secured the passage of the "beer act" in the British Parliament. For thirty-nine years this remained in full force, and meanwhile England sank deeper and deeper in drunkenness. The Convocation of Canterbury, a department of the English church which has ecclesiastical supervision over fourteen millions of persons, then instituted a careful inquiry into the results of this same beer act. Let me give you the summing up of the testimony taken from the lips of thousands of witnesses, not themselves temperance people either, but for the most part public officers of the law:—

"This ale and beer act, though introduced for the avowed purpose of repressing intemperance by counteracting the temptation to excessive drinking of ardent spirits, has been abundantly proved not only to have failed of its benevolent purpose, but to have served, throughout the country, to multiply and intensify the very evils it was intended to remove."

If ever history learned a costly lesson that she might teach it to posterity, it was this one, which America ignores to-day. But the evils of beer legislation must not, in this connection, be overlooked. We live in a republic where each man counts one in every decision by which public opinion crystalizes into law. The brewers are fast becoming dictators to those in power. I quote Mr. Schade, the editor of their organ at Washington.

"No, gentlemen, first personal and then political liberty. First beer, then politics. If we want to succeed, we must do it at the ballot-box."

I quote Mr. Clausen, president of the tenth brewers' congress:—

"Unity is necessary, and we must form an organization which not only controls a capital of $200,000,000, but which also commands thousands of votes. By our efforts the former minority in the assembly of New York State was changed to a majority of twenty votes in our favor." It is as dangerous to the Republic to be governed by an oligarchy of beer-brewing and beer-drinking citizens as by a single wicked tyrant. Yet our cities are rapidly being thus governed, and no one can read the Congressional Record and see the steady concessions to the brewing interest without being aware that beer is already the determining factor in our politics. Before this blear-eyed, foamy-mouthed monster, legislatures bow the knee, municipal authorities grovel in the dust, crying, "Great is Gambrinus of the Teutonians." When a million blurred and muddled ballots are cast into the box on election day, the Goddess of Liberty may well veil her face in shame.