A NATION'S youth are its most valuable asset; and any organization that is devoted to corrupting the moral, wrecking the physical, and blasting the mental life of the child, is a declared enemy of national efficiency, conservation, and preparedness.
“We do without food and clothes so that papa can help the saloon keeper pay his license fee.”
That a despoilation of childhood is the result of the liquor traffic, is evinced by the increasing tide of crime attributable to young men and women under the influence of liquor.
Personal investigation of conditions in all the large cities of the Pacific coast convinces me that the larger number of persons who become hopeless drunkards or hardened criminals begin drinking before they are of age. Government reports show that there is a gradual lowering, each year, of the average age of the criminal. Indeed, the press teems with accounts of mere children in years who are old in vice.
The liquor traffic realizes the necessity of keeping recruits coming into its huge staggering army. To this end, the youth are treated whenever possible. The accompanying photographs [see top of preceding page] are of liquor receptacles in the possession of the writer. They were filled with liquor, and given by the liquor interests to children, whose curiosity would lead them to imbibe the contents, and thus acquire a thirst for drink.
One of these receptacles, the "ruler," was given by a saloon keeper in Hillsboro, Oregon, to a boy of thirteen, as he passed the saloon on his way to school. He was drinking from it in school when the teacher discovered it and took it from him.
During the Christmas season every year, the liquor interests distribute hundreds of thousands of bottles like those pictured here, to the youth of this country. In one small town in Oregon, a liquor man slipped into a church where the Sunday school Christmas tree of the churches of the town had been prepared, and hung on the tree a china cucumber filled with whisky for every name he found already on the presents. This diabolical attempt to corrupt the youth was fortunately discovered by the superintendent.
Investigation has convinced me that alcohol is the chief means used to lure girls to ruin. The saloon and white slavery are the devil's Siamese twins. So long as we allow the liquor traffic to exist, we will make little headway against white slavery. Saloons, fallen women, and gambling hells are always found together.
Investigation proves that ninety-five per cent of the fallen women not only drink, but insist on their consorts' drinking. Men use liquor to ruin women, and then these ruined women use liquor to ruin men. Thus vice grows by what it feeds upon.
Few men in their sober senses will consort with the vile and diseased women of the red-light district, but alcohol relaxes the morals while exciting the passions. That is why houses of ill fame are placed as near as possible to saloons. Thus diseases of the vilest kind are contracted.
Reliable information from the highest authorities shows that at least seventy per cent of the men of the large cities are diseased by such life, and that seventy-five per cent of all the operations performed on women are made necessary by contamination from these men. The average age of these women is only twenty-four—mere girls. Over fifty thousand girls from twelve to eighteen years old are lured to ruin every year, largely through the use of liquor.
If we are to roll back the increasing tide of vice, we must clean up the cities; for vice increases in the cities much faster than the population. A city of 500,000 commits about ten times as many crimes as a city of 100,000, though it is only five times as large. This is not guesswork, but a fact, and an ominous one, in a country where the cities are growing as fast as they are in the United States.
If we would save our cities, and thus our youth, we must put forth strenuous efforts immediately, before vice becomes so entrenched as to make this impossible. The vote in many states this fall will determine whether we realize the importance of saving our youth.
"If you would make it easier for the youth to do right, and more difficult for the youth to do wrong, you must destroy the liquor traffic, their greatest tempter from the path of rectitude."
