Your ShelfYour Projects

The People and the Saloon

7%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 30, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 18.

Read the full edition

The People and the Saloon

By C. M. S.

Since mankind first acquired a taste for fermented drinks, there has been a fierce warfare on the part of the human family against the most tyrannical master and the most heartless slavery this world has ever known. For centuries the Word of God has voiced the divine warning against strong drink as a mocker and a deceiver; and it has proved to be such to every soul who has dallied with it.
It has promised riches and happiness, and it has given rags and misery. It has promised sociability and esteem, and it has given the tongue of the idiot and the contempt of the sober and intelligent. It has promised position and honor, and it has given beggary and disgrace. It has promised friendship and confidence, and it has given enmity and distrust. It has promised health and strength, and it has given disease, senility, and decrepitude. It has promised prosperous homes and healthy and happy children; and how has it fulfilled that promise? It has turned homes that were happy and prosperous into hovels where naught butwretchedness could abide, and has sold the shoes off the children's feet to satisfy the insatiable appetite which it had created; and the children such homes have brought into the world have either died in infancy or survived under a terrible handicap of disease in both body and mind, to pass on this contagion of moral and physical ruin to the generations to follow them.
Strong drink has been a devourer and a waster in every country and in every age. It has built no institutions of charity, but it has furnished nearly all the inmates of such institutions. It has built no schools, but it has befogged the minds of children and children's children, and made more difficult the work of these institutions, while at the same time it has so marred the intellect of thousands of children that the schools can accomplish nothing for them. It has made no laws for the uplift of humanity, but it has broken every law of God and man, made necessary the majority of our penal institutions, and furnished their inmates. It has paid a tax to the people for the privilege of living off them to their ruin, but its existence and activity have made it necessary for the people to tax themselves fourfold more to take care of the pitiable product of the liquor industry.
The liquor industry could not live but for a perverted appetite, and its only hope of continuing is in holding human beings under the thralldom of that perverted appetite while they dole out their earnings from day to day to satisfy a craving which grows ever more insistent and more insatiable.
As a waster it has never been equaled. Every farthing added to its bank account represents an out-and-out waste,—a waste in mental, moral, and physical fiber in those who pay their money to have it prey upon them; a waste in the food products which it turns into drink; and a waste in manhood and womanhood and childhood, in virtue, in intelligence, in happiness, in self-respect—in everything that is worth while.
The liquor business has added nothing to the world in the way of knowledge, education, science, or invention; but it has piled a weight of unutterable woe upon every household it has entered. Hearts that were as light and happy as any the world ever knew have been crushed under its iron heel, and hopes that were as bright as any have been snuffed out by it like a candle in a gale. It has gone through the world, like the monster of a hideous nightmare, with its remorseless jaws running red with the blood of its helpless victims. Whatever was good it has made bad, and whatever was bad it has made worse. It has chosen the best where it could, and the worst where it could not get the best, and has heaped them all in ruin together.
Its only inventions have been devices for more surely and speedily enslaving men. It lives by the ruin it can do. It feeds like a cancer on the vitals of humanity. It gives nothing, but it sweeps the world with its devil-fish tentacles to bring all humanity within its clutches and drain the vital fluids of the race.
And men have actually given license to that terrible monster to carry on its operations. If this world should stand for a hundred years, our children's children would look back upon the licensing of the liquor business with as much astonishment as we now look back upon the burning of men and women for their faith, or the selling of human beings into slavery. There is no consideration upon which men would think of pampering a poisonous serpent and giving it liberty to strike its fangs into their flesh, poisoning their blood and hastening their death; and yet strong drink has poisoned more persons and caused more deaths than any family of poisonous serpents during all the time from Adam's day to ours.
But the race is being aroused to the inconsistency of the matter. It is throwing off the lethargy that has bound it through the centuries. It is beginning to realize the fearful moral and physical and economic waste involved in the continuance of the liquor traffic. Municipalities and States are throwing off the yoke of the liquor thralldom, and they find not only that they can survive without the money paid by the liquor business in license fees, but that the elimination of the liquor business has increased their prosperity and decreased their outlay for paupers and criminals. The little Blue Ribbon Clubs of thirty-five years ago have grown into great organizations, of whose existence the strongest political parties have found it expedient to take cognizance. Great and populous States are enlisting in the prohibition ranks or are giving their inhabitants the privilege of settling the liquor question by local option plebiscite; and the people are rising to their opportunity, and have actually been wiping the saloons off the map at the rate of forty a day for each working day for several years.
It is not a spasmodic movement, but a continuous campaign. There is some backward-and-forward play in localities, just as there are some minor engagements lost and won during the progress of a great war; but the territory controlled by the liquor forces grows less with each new year, and that controlled by the temperance forces grows in like ratio greater. The victory of the present year in Illinois is a memorable one. The recent election in that State adds sixteen counties to the dry column, and closes more than one thousand saloons. The temperance forces will at once begin a campaign of education in the great city of Chicago, with the definite purpose of making Chicago a temperance city by 1915. One of Chicago's dailies has joined the ranks of newspapers that refuse liquor advertisements, declaring that the proper use of alcoholic liquors "should rest with the family physician rather than with the family newspaper."
The Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce has passed drastic resolutions denouncing "the economic folly of licensing liquor dealers." The Secretary of the Navy feels that the time has come to forbid the use of liquors by any one on board the nation's warships, and he has done so.
More than forty-seven million of the inhabitants of the United States are now living in prohibition territory. Seventy-one per cent of the territory of this country is now under the jurisdiction of prohibitory law. By the provisions of the Webb-Kenyon Interstate Liquor Shipment Bill it was made illegal to ship liquor into prohibition States. The passage of this bill was a victory for temperance whose importance cannot be overestimated. The federal government cannot now override State laws and force prohibition States to open their doors for the entrance of liquors.
The resolutions now before both houses of Congress for the Constitutional prohibition of the liquor traffic mark another mighty stride in the progress of the temperance cause. As a temperance people we should throw the weight of our influence unreservedly on the side of these measures. By voice and pen and vote we are instructed to make our influence tell in the grand work of freeing human beings from the thralldom of liquor. The mind that is enslaved and benumbed by alcohol cannot respond to the principles of the everlasting gospel. The temperance work, therefore, becomes one of the important factors in opening the way for this message of the kingdom to bear its testimony to the people of this world. The struggle is reaching its climax, the forces of the liquor interests are hard pressed. Let us do what we can to make the victory sure.
C. M. S.