Two thousand five hundred little white caskets were required to lay away the babies slain last year by drunken fathers. Each was some mother's child — but those twenty-five hundred sweet rosebud mouths are silent now. How many times more must this bloody record be repeated? The liquor traffic is the "diabolical enemy of American childhood." It transforms the natural protector of the home into a fiend incarnate. It puts out the love fire upon the hearth of the home.
"THE drunkard's children — robbed of home comforts, education, and training, living in terror of him who should be their pride and protection, thrust into the world, bearing the brand of shame, often with the hereditary curse of the drunkard's thirst."
Drink Multiplies Weaklings
At the international congress against alcoholism in 1909, Prof. Taav. Laitinen, of the University of Helsingfors, presented facts showing that in abstaining families, 1.3% of the children were weaklings; whereas in drinking families, 8.2% were weaklings.3Statistics were also presented based upon 19,519 children in 5,736 families. Abstaining families lost 13% of children by death; the families of moderate drinking parents, 23%. (These moderate drinkers drank no more daily than corresponded to one glass of 4% beer.) Immoderate drinking parents lost 32% of their children.
Professor Laitinen also showed, beyond the possibility of successful contradiction, that drinkers' children develop more slowly than the children of abstainers. This fact was based upon the study of 2,125 children from 2,125 families.
It is a noble thing to save a drunkard, but it is a thousand times better to prevent a man from becoming a drunkard.
The Despoiler of Childhood
By Editor
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
Abolish This Destroyer of Childhood!
A Baby's Rights
EVERY baby has a right to be born with a sound mind and a sound body, free from the degeneracy of alcoholism, such as idiocy, epilepsy, St. Vitus's dance; free from the physical weaknesses that manifest themselves in an increased death rate; free from the environment that logically leads to reformatories and penitentiaries, in the budding of their manhood and womanhood; free from the industrial child slavery that so often rules the drunkard's home; free from the blighting stigma that "papa was a drunkard"; free from every taint of the curse of drink — the nation's and childhood's foe.
Increase of Defectives
A. Von Bunge, M. D., of Basel, Switzerland, presents indisputable evidence of the fact that alcoholism and defects of brain and nerves go hand in hand; that defective children increase proportionately to the alcoholization of fathers. These defects are epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, and St. Vitus's dance.
Of the children of occasional drinkers, 2.3% are defective; of regular moderate drinkers, 4.6%. (And by regular moderate drinkers is meant those who drink daily less than two quarts of beer.) Of the children of regular heavy drinkers, 9% are defectives; whereas of the children of drunkards, 19% are defective.
"In many a household, little children, even in the innocence and helplessness of babyhood, are in daily peril through the neglect, the abuse, the vileness, of drunken mothers."
Wanted—Your Boy
By Newton N. Riddell
IT takes one hundred twenty-five thousand boys a year to keep the liquor business going. The liquor men have plenty of money. They can buy all the grain and hops they want. They can hire all the help they need. But they can't run their business without boys. They don't buy these, so I'm going to ask you for a donation. I want your boy to put on the altar of sacrifice. Better send along your daughter, too; for every drunken man implies a fallen woman or a disgraced wife. Your child, my brother—your son for drunkenness, and your daughter for shame. Come, now, don't refuse. You voted to license. The saloon keeper has paid you the money demanded, and has a legal right to him.
What did you say? "Not your boy, but your neighbor's boy"?
Shame on the man that will sacrifice his neighbor's child and refuse his own! Give to the rum fiend that life you love better than your own. Go home to-night and take those children from their mother's arms. Recall the joy of their childhood and the promise of their youth, and then say to that mother, "I have decided to make an offering to the rum fiend."
Can you do it?—No! No! Well, then, with the children in your arms, and the little wife by your side, on election day put the interests of these children and that loving wife on a white ballot. Get on the firing line and do your duty, and soon it will not be necessary for you, or any other father, to sacrifice his children.—Newton N. Riddell.
PROTECT YOUR BOYS FROM DRINK.
The Devil's Siamese Twins
By Earle Albert Rowell
EARLE ALBERT ROWELL
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."
To Blame for Misery
GERTRUDE H. BRITTAN, superintendent of the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association, is authority for this statement: "Of children in misery, parents' drink is to blame in at least three cases out of every four." In other words, seventy-five per cent of the burdens of childhood are due to alcohol. Her statement is based upon the study of 1,739 cases of adult delinquency, between January 1 and June 30, 1910.
"It is still the custom of wet communities to pave the streets and roads with fines from vice resorts, while these resorts pave the way to perdition for the young people of the communities."
Creating the Thirst
THE sinister activity of the liquor interests in creating the "drink" thirst is evidenced by this statement from one of their organizations:
"We must do as the families in Europe — add a little wine to the glass of water for the children — educate them to use wine at their meals."
THE life of the liquor traffic depends upon the creation of the drink appetite among the youth.
2,000,000 Child Slaves
According to the Hon. John J. Lentz, there are in the United States "more than two million children under fourteen years of age who are laborers; or rather—let me call them by their right name—they are child slaves, just as truly and even more cruelly than were our Negro black slaves before the Civil War."
The Gold That Paves the Streets
"PAVE to-day the broad highway
With something not so white as the souls
Of the innocent boys at play.
Why can't men pave the business marts
With something harder than women's hearts?
Is there no gold that will serve their turn,
Save the shining gold of the heads that rest
Soft on a mother's loving breast?
Must these go down to a drunkard's grave,
In order that we the streets may pave?"
Driven to Slavery
By John Lennon
THE saloon is sending more children into the factory, the mines, the mills and shops, that ought to be at school or play, than the influence of the trade-union has been able to eliminate, either by direct action or by legislation. . . . The saloon influence is driving by the thousands women into the industrial world who ought to be at home.
If any of the organized wageworkers of your community doubt these assertions, let them go out and do a little studying for themselves.
-John Lennon, Labor Leader.
