A LICENSE ARGUMENT REFUTED.
THE pre-eminent pretext for maintaining saloons in towns is the revenue to be obtained from the licenses. The liquor dealers and their supporters always hold up before the people the menace of higher taxes if the saloons are abolished, and with many people this is a veritable scarecrow. They do not stop to consider the various ways in which the saloon curse costs more than it ever could make up in the mere matter of license money. But on this one point alone we have an official comparison of two small cities of about equal population—Riverside and Santa Barbara, Cal. These cities are each accredited with about 11,000 inhabitants. Riverside has no saloons; Santa Barbara has twenty-five, from which the treasury received $7,500 in 1904. Yet Santa Barbara with this amount of saloon revenue, has a city tax rate of $1.30; while Riverside, with no saloon license money, has a city tax rate of only $1.10. The city of Riverside has three more grocery stores, three more meat markets, and three more clothing stores than Santa Barbara. The people of Riverside have $78,000 more in the savings banks than those of Santa Barbara. In Riverside there are over four hundred more children in the public schools than in Santa Barbara; while Santa Barbara had 554 more arrests for crime in 1904 than Riverside. People should never allow the license money delusion to lure them into harboring the saloon viper in their midst. It is not only a financial delusion, but it is a social and moral delusion the cost of which can never be estimated.