It is the conviction of men of to-day that the saloon is doomed. We are gathering our forces for the coming Armageddon, when this traffic of iniquity shall go down in irretrievable defeat. The forces of justice and righteousness, of integrity and truth, of morality and religion, Jew and gentile, Catholic and Protestant — in fact, the good men of the nation — are arranging themselves in battle line, and opposed to them are all the forces of iniquity, captained by the liquor power.
The issue before us is a simple one. Driven from big business, outflanked on the plains of science, outgeneraled in the home, retreating from the fields of education, from redoubt to redoubt, from entrenchment to entrenchment, has the foe been driven, until it has centered itself in its last and only stronghold, the Granada of last possession — the government. Shall the government be a partner in the liquor traffic? and shall the liquor traffic be a partner with the government?
By the memory of heroic sires who sought, by their sacrifices, to perpetuate to the people of to-day their heritage of freedom; by the ideals of those magnificent American characters who used tongue and pen in the past, and spent the powers of their brilliant minds, in giving to the humblest citizen security under his "own vine and fig tree"; by the knowledge that all of these blessings have been sapped, undermined, and threatened with annihilation by that brazen power, the whisky oligarchy, with its impudent assertion of "We are the people"; and for the