What a Catholic Paper Says.
By Western Watchman
DRINKING for the mere exhilaration is madness. We are becoming a nation of paranoics, because we persist in stimulating the mind while leaving the body in languid inactivity. We are getting off every beaten track. We are developing criminals at a tremendous rate. All are graduates of the barroom. We are multiplying our schools; but for every school we put up, there are opened ten barrooms. We are building churches; but for every church that is erected fifty barrooms fling open their doors. We are adding new factories and opening up new branches of industry at an unprecedented rate; but opposite every entrance to a factory, along all the lines and avenues of industry, you see the barroom. These are centers of crime, resorts of the vicious and indolent, the breeding places of riot and lawlessness, the vestibules of the penitentiary. The barroom must go! The laws are impotent to deal with the evil. We have asylums for the chronically insane. We house and keep them at an enormous cost. But for one person who is chronically and naturally mad, there are ten thousand who make themselves temporarily idiotic and throw themselves into a voluntary and artificial insanity, far more terrible while it lasts than the worst form of mental aberration treated in our asylums. The world is full of widows and orphans, made so by the barroom. The world is full of wife-beaters and murderers, made so in the barroom. The whole moral and industrial world is kept in turmoil and convulsion by men whose parliament is the barroom. The barroom must go.