p. 10 | HOW MUCH MORE TIME? by M. C. W.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 31, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 34.

HOW MUCH MORE TIME?

By M. C. W.

ONE plea in the last temperance campaign in California was that "we must give the wine men more time;" "we must be just to the wine men who have invested their money;" "we must be fair." And the cafés and wine rooms run on in the cities and towns of the state. There are said to be one hundred of them outside the regular saloons in Los Angeles. What do these concessions to the wine men — these open wine rooms — mean? Let Mr. Wiley J. Phillips, editor of the California Voice, a thoroughly reliable man, answer, as he does in the Voice of August 8:

"I visited some of these one hundred wine rooms and cafés. One night, I visited three of them, and my notes are now before me. In these three, I counted 352 young girls and women, and over 500 boys and men, drinking. On another occasion, on Sunday night after church, I visited four of these wine rooms which it would not be 'fair or just to the wine men to close,' and on Sunday night I counted 391 girls, with a larger number of men and boys, drinking wine and other liquors. The other 93 places, I did not visit. On my visit to the three where there were over 350 girls and women being 'fair' to the wine trust, I saw many girls so far gone in intoxication that they could not leave the place unassisted — in other words, they were beastly drunk. Among the 391 that I counted on Sunday night, was the daughter of one of the pastors of the city who was preaching that night in his pulpit. I could not remonstrate with her, for her father had voted to permit these places to do business. Well, they were doing business, and are doing the same business still.

"In the five places that I visited — five out of a hundred — scores of these girls and young men were not only starting on the way to ruin, but were there — some of them for the first time — almost helplessly drunk.

"Do the fathers and mothers of these boys and girls owe the wine men anything? Would you plead with the 'narrow-minded Prohibitionists' to be 'just' and 'fair' with the wine men, if these were your boys or girls? Always on the outside, autos and taxicabs are waiting for the victims of these cafés and wine rooms.

"Have you, my dear sir, or my dear madam, ever followed them at a late hour to see where the wine-inflamed or drugged and often unconscious daughters of this and other cities where they want to be 'fair to the wine industry,' are taken? Well, I have. If you have not, then come and visit with me some of those living morgues where virtue has been murdered and where suicide and homicide leave shrouded beauties despoiled of its charms — cold and stark, the silent witnesses of man's villainy and money's power. Go with me to the district where reeking bacchanalians hold their midnight revelries and indulge in the drunken, beastly orgies of lust. Go with me and listen to virtue's dying shriek as it echoes through those sin-stained alleyways, where mother love, like an angel of mercy, has sought to enter in quest of a lost child, but has been driven back. Go with me to where the weird and dusky ghosts of lost hopes shave the midnight gloom with somber wings, while specters dance their dance of death upon every thorny pillow where lies the head of some mother's girl who was once rocked in dreams upon that mother's bosom, and then tell me by the authority of what law, human or divine, you claim the right to barter away the girlhood and young manhood of this state for a single day on what you claim to be 'ethical grounds.' If ethics means the exercise of moral principles and humane duty, then my idea of ethics — human duty — in harmony with moral principles, would be to exercise it toward the rising generation rather than toward the millionaire wine trusts of the state."

M. C. W.