Photographs of toys filled with liquor, and given to children by the liquor men, in their efforts to create the drink thirst among the youth. These receptacles are in the possession of Mr. Earle Albert Rowell. See "The Devil's Siamese Twins" on next page.
What is dearer to the hearts of all true and loyal parents than the well-being of their boys and girls? And it is because the drink demon is the great robber of the children's birthright, because the mailed fist of King Alcohol strikes hardest at childhood's cradle, because it is the "ravisher of girls," and the "corrupter of boys," and the "despoiler of homes," that we present this phase of the mighty American issue first.
EDITOR.
The Trail of the Serpent
MARY ALICE HARE LOPER
THERE is no crime too diabolical to be committed by King Alcohol, the satanic tyrant who holds in his relentless grasp the keys of juvenile reformatories, jails, penitentiaries, and infernal brothels.
In this twentieth century, under the blazing light of Christianity, our own beloved Golden State is wet with liquor mildew, which blights its fairest flowers — our promising sons and daughters — and leaves them to suffer premature death, and to occupy unhonored graves. How long must this vile curse continue to rob our commonwealth of intellect, of genius and ability — how long?
Think of it — one hundred thousand drinking men in California alone! Picture to yourself the multiplied thousands of dependent women and helpless children suffering poverty, disgrace, and shame as the result. Many of these men seem as powerless to release themselves from the giant octopus of intoxicating liquor, as is the drunken chauffeur who lies unconscious beneath his overturned motor car. Many men long to be freed from this infamous habit, and would hail with joy the news that California is numbered in the lengthening list of dry states.
The multitudes of widows and orphans, of neglected and deserted mothers and children, afford such an argument against the liquor business as should melt the stoutest heart. Instead, liquor dealers are putting forth most strenuous efforts to educate our children to become drunkards. It has been truthfully asserted that the heathen African who baits with a living infant his trap for the white man, is less inhuman than the liquor men of this enlightened country who seek to entice the children by stealthily winding about them the deathly coils of the serpent habit, by means of doped candies, nickel treats of wine and beer, and other enticements, that they may become the future patrons of the liquor traffic.
WEEPING HER LIFE AWAY
As long as husbands and fathers drink intoxicants, women and children will weep, and poverty and wretchedness will be the common heritage of the drunkard's posterity. The child has a right to be well born, free from hereditary taints of evil habits. He has a right to be well reared, to be properly educated, and to experience parental love and the joys of a happy home.
The trusting bride who kneels at the marriage altar has a right to expect a respectable home and decent support from the man into whose keeping she intrusts her earthly happiness.
But how often, as time goes on, she becomes a drudge, it may be to the extent of supporting her husband, who, because of drink, proves false to his trust, and gives to the greedy monster of the still his meager earnings! She becomes the breadwinner for herself and her helpless children also, and thus struggles for existence, while the wolf of hunger howls at their hovel door, and unrelenting pauperism constantly stares them in the face.
A little brandy in his milk to soothe him to sleep quickly. Alcohol is also present in the milk of nursing mothers when they use liquor to excess. Alcohol has a greater effect upon cells in proportion to their immaturity. Alcoholic mother's milk is not suited for the building up of a healthy body.
The pallet of straw which serves as a mother's deathbed tells, more loudly than words can express, that the cause of this awful travesty on "home, sweet home" is the accursed liquor traffic. Yet the shivering waif who finds in some secluded cellarway or dry-goods box a pretense of shelter from the wintry blast, may not survive long enough to comprehend fully the injustice of his misery.
Street waifs are a sure product of the liquor traffic. They associate promiscuously in the streets, where, day by day, from babyhood to maturity, they receive an education in sin which fits them to enter the ranks of criminals. They fall an easy prey to evil-doing; for while the mother is compelled to toil early and late because the father spends his time and earnings in the saloon, the children are deprived of their rightful training.
Thousands of promising boys go down to ruin, and thousands of innocent girls are decoyed and thrust into the infernal dens of vice, through the medium of intoxicants. From myriads of living tombs ascend the hopeless cries of helpless victims, while fiends gloat over a spectacle of sin sufficiently appalling and heart-rending to make angels weep.
Myriads of earth's fairest blossoms are doomed to die a lingering death and to sleep in unknown graves, unless an end is put to the liquor traffic. Could our sweatshops and many of our department stores reveal their revolting secrets, could the sad-hearted, broken-spirited women and girls make known their misery, would not a pitying world have sympathy, and consider an opportunity like that of November 7 a godsend "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free!"
Many a man, transformed by drink into a fiend, murders outright or by inches the woman he has promised before God to love, honor, and cherish. Many a wife sacrifices her life upon the black-mantled altar of despair and loathsome disease, as veritably a martyr to the wicked rum power as is her husband who fills a drunkard's grave. Our hospitals are teeming with wretched victims of sin and debauchery, the result of the fiendish liquor habit. No words can do justice to the sickening details of heredity and crime that result from this nefarious business, which, like a huge boa constrictor, is crushing out the life of the world.
Stand aghast before this awful spectacle, ye voters of the Golden State. Go to the polls on November 7, and help write "Finis" to California's part in this blackened history, and thus permit Old Glory to wave proudly from Mount Shasta to San Diego, over a grateful people emancipated from the accursed thralldom of the liquor traffic.3
