"I wind about and in and out,With here a blossom sailing;Here and there a lusty trout,And here and there a grey-ling."
"I wind about and in and out,With here a blossom sailing;Here and there a lusty trout,And here and there a grey-ling."
"I wind about and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing;
Here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grey-ling."
When my time was half gone I felt I was gone too unless I could get a littlenearer the heart of the judge. Opening the door art had made to shut in the flowers of a lovely family I brought out the golden-haired girl.
Taking off the sun-bonnet of art, that the good-night kisses of the sinking sun might enrich her rosy cheeks and golden tresses, I sent her strolling down the winding walk hedged in by hawthorn and hyacinth to the water's brink. Here I gave her a cushion of blue-grass, and with the rising moon pouring its shimmering sheen upon the ripples at her feet, I sent her voice floating away on the evening air singing: "Roll on silver moon, guide the traveler on his way." Here the audience cheered, the judge smiled and I felt encouraged.
With but two minutes left I had the shapely fingers of nature, take out the hair-pins of art and the golden tresses fall about the snowy neck of nature. Then came the untying of the shoe-strings of art; off came the shoes and stockings of art, and the pretty feet of nature were dipping in the limpid stream. I said, "Judge, the question is, which is the more attractive, the works of nature or the works of art? With my father's pictureof steam engines, stage coaches, reapers, binders, mowing machines and every known triumph of art on one side; on the other the highest type of the world's creation, a beautiful woman, the stars of nature stooping to kiss her brow, and laughing waters of nature leaping to kiss her feet; where your eyes would rest there let your decision be given."
After the debate a friend said to me: "It was that last home picture that saved you." My father who heard the remark said, "Yes, a picture of a red-headed girl washing her feet in a goose branch." I may add, I was careful after the contest not to get very near the young lady with whom I had taken such platform liberty.
Reason, rhetoric, pathos, poetry, diction, gesture, wit and humor, each has its place on the platform. While logic sounds the depths of thought, humor ripples its surface with laughing wavelets. While reason cultivates the cornfields of the mind, rhetoric beautifies the pleasure gardens.
John B. Gough was the most popular platform orator of his day. He began lecturing at from two to five dollars an evening. He grew in popularity until he wasin demand at five hundred dollars a lecture, and no one before or since more successfully used all the arts of the platform, from the comic that drew the very rabble of the streets, to flights of eloquence that captured college culture. It has been well said: "While Gough was a great preacher of righteousness, he was a whole theatre in dramatic delivery." Lecturers, like preachers, are fishers of men, and there are as many kinds of people in an average audience as there are kinds of fish in the sea. It requires variety of bait for humanity as well as for fish.
Sam Jones used slang as one kind of bait and he used to say: "It beats all how it draws." I saw this verified at Ottawa, Kansas, Chautauqua. Giving a Saturday evening lecture he baited the platform with slang, satire and humor. Sunday afternoon an hour before time for his lecture the people were hurrying to the auditorium. When presented to the great audience he said: "Record! Record! Record!" I remember the sermon as one of the sweetest and most powerful I ever heard. Its influence will not cease this side the eternal morning.
Rowland Hill, the popular London preacher, used quaint humor to draw the people, and powerful appeal to sweep them into the kingdom.
It is said the fountain of laughter and fountain of tears lie very close together. My experience has been, that often the best way to the fountain of tears is by the way of the fountain of laughter. Some years ago at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I was to lecture on the subject, "Boys and Girls, Nice and Naughty." A wealthy widow and her only son were there from New York, where the young boy had been leading a "gay life." Ocean Grove with its quiet, moral atmosphere was a dull place for this young man. He happened to read the subject for the lecture on the bulletin board, and thinking it suggestive of humor he went to hear the lecture. He had what he went for, as the lecture did deal with the fountain of laughter, but it also dealt with the fountain of tears. It swung the red lantern of danger athwart the pathway of the wayward young man. Following a story of mother love, I said: "Young man, let the cares and burdens of life press you down to the very earth, let the great waves of sorrow roll over your soul, but let no act of yours ever roll aclod upon the coffin of her, whose image, enshrined upon the inner walls of your memory, white winters and long bright summers can never wash away."
A minister told me after, that in a young people's meeting this young man arose and said: "I attended a lecture at Ocean Grove, thinking I would have a humorous entertainment. I left the auditorium the saddest soul in the great audience. Going down to the beach I tried to drive away the spell, but it grew upon me. I could see how I had grieved my mother, and the past came rolling up like the waves of the ocean. I shuddered as they broke on my awakened conscience and quickened memory. Behind me was an unhallowed past, and before me the brink of an awful eternity. There and then I resolved to change my course. Alone under the stars I made my resolve and then started to my mother. She was waiting for me, and said: 'My son, I wished for you at the lecture this evening. I think you would have enjoyed it.' I then told her I was determined to lead a new life and had come to seal my vow with her kiss."
That young man went to the lecture to laugh, he left to walk alone with God under the stars by the ocean deep, there to decide to lead a righteous life, and seal the vow with a loving mother's kiss.
So while in my humble way I have endeavored to use the arts that entertain I have cherished the purpose to better human lives.
I have referred to the platform as being baited for humanity. Have you ever considered how it is baited to resist the forces of evil?
The day was when Satan had an attraction trust that controlled about the whole output of entertainment. The platform now is a picture gallery where is to be had all beauty in nature, from our own land to the land of the midnight sun.
In moving pictures it presents to those who never saw ship, sail or sea, the landing of a great steamer, with splashing of spray as real as if seen from the dock. To those who enjoy music it furnishes band concerts, orchestra, bell-ringing, quartettes, solos, plantation melodies, rag-time tunes and women whistlers.
The platform today beats the devil in output of entertainment. It has scoured field and forest, trained birds and dogsto round out the program of a chautauqua.
Its breadth takes in all creeds and kinds. While it greets with waving lilies Bishop Vincent, leader of the great chautauqua movement, it cordially welcomes the priest, the Jew, the Chinaman, the negro, republican, democrat, progressive, prohibitionist, socialist and suffragist.
The platform has grown to be a great university, a musical festival, a zoological garden, an art institute, an agricultural college and a domestic science school.
Do you ask has the platform any blemishes? I answer yes. All enterprises have their blemishes. The press is a potent power for good and yet many bad things get into print. Sometimes from the platform come voices without the ring of sincerity, entertainments without uplifting influence and anecdotes without respect to public decency. When attending platform entertainments one should discriminate as when eating fish, enjoy the meat and discard the bones. With good taste in selection one rarely ever need go away hungry.
I am often asked: "Where do you find the most appreciative audiences?"
First, I would reply, in rural communities where the people are not surfeited with entertainment. Second, I would say, applause does not always mean appreciation. It is said "still water runs deep." In Chickering Hall, New York, one Sunday afternoon a lady sat before me whose diamonds and dress indicated wealth. A lad sat by her side. My subject was, "The Safe Side of Life for Young Men." It was a temperance address and the thought came to me; that lady is a wine drinker and she is disappointed that I am to talk temperance. She did not cheer with the audience, nor did she give any expression of face that would indicate her interest, except that she kept her eyes fixed upon the speaker. At the close she came to the platform and said: "I brought my son with me and you said what I wanted him to hear; I thank you," and with this she took my hand saying, "Again I thank you," and turning away, left a coin in my hand.
I put it in my pocket, and on returning to the hotel found she had given me a twenty dollar gold piece. That was gold standard appreciation.
I am frequently asked: "What do you recall as the best introduction you ever had?"
I have had all kinds, some amusing, but the one I cherish most was given by Ferd Schumacher, the deceased oatmeal king of Akron, Ohio. He came to this country from Germany. By industry and economy he accumulated enough money to engage in making oatmeal. When he had rounded up more than a million of dollars in wealth, the insurance ran out on his great "Jumbo Mills" in Akron. The insurance company raised the rate and while he was dickering with the company, the great plant was swept away in a midnight fire. Mr. Schumacher was a very earnest temperance man and was to introduce me for the W.C.T.U. in the large armory the Sunday after the fire. It was supposed he would not be present because of the severe strain and his great loss. But prompt to the minute he entered the door, and 'mid the applause of sympathetic friends he took the platform.
In presenting the speaker he said: "Ladies and schentlemen, I must be personal for a moment while I thank the people of Akron for their sympathy. I did not know I had so many good friends. But the millvot vos burned vos made of stone and vood and nails and paint. We come to talk to you about a fire vot is burning up the homes, the hopes, the peace of vimen and children and the immortal souls of men; vill you please take your sympathy off of Ferd Schumacher and give it to Mr. Bain while he talks about the great fire of intemperance."
I am opposed to indiscriminate immigration to this country, but if the old world has any more Ferd Schumachers desiring to come to America, may He who rules winds and waves, fill with harmless pressure the billows on which they ride and give them safe entrance into our country's haven.
Many inquire of me about the lyceum platform as a profession. My answer is: "like the famed shield it has two sides." One who has a lovely home and rarely leaves it said to me: "I envy you your life-work. You get to see the country, visit the great cities, meet the best people and get fat fees for your lectures." How distance does lend enchantment to the view sometimes!
A few years ago we notified the bureaus not to make engagements away from therailroads in the northwest during the blizzard months. A letter came saying: "Enter Wessington College, outside of Woonsocket." We supposed outside meant adjacent. Arriving at Woonsocket in a blizzard I found Wessington seventeen miles away. Wrapped in robes I made the drive, arriving about six o'clock in the evening. On arrival I was informed that smallpox had broken out in the village. The hotel had been quarantined but a room had been engaged for me in a private home. While taking my supper my hostess said: "Would you know smallpox if you were to see the symptoms?"
"Know what? Why do you ask that?" I asked.
She called attention to the face of her daughter who was serving the supper. One glance and my appetite fled, as I said: "Excuse me, please. I must get ready for my lecture," and I left the room. One hour later I stood before a vaccinated audience with visions of smallpox floating before me, and for days after I imagined I could feel it coming.
Add to this experience midnight rides on freight trains, long drives in rain, mud and storm, ten minutes for lunch at sandwichcounter, eight months of the year away from home—the only heaven one who loves his family has on earth, and you have a taste of the side my neighbor did not see.
There is, however, a bright side. Whoever can get the ear of the public from the platform, has an opportunity to sow seed, the fruit of which will be gathered by angels when he has gone to his reward. One so long on the platform as I have been, cannot fail in having experiences that gladden the heart, if he has done faithful service.
Out of hundreds I select one experience that should encourage all who labor in the Master's vineyard. I had traveled two hundred miles in a day to reach an engagement, and the last seven miles in a buggy over a miserable road. I did not reach the village until nine o'clock. Without supper and chilled by the ride, I threw off my wraps and wearily made my way through the lecture. A little later in my room at the hotel, while I was taking a lunch of bread and milk, a minister entered and said: "You seem to be very tired." When I answered, "Never more so," he replied: "I have a story to tell youwhich will perhaps rest you."
Continuing he said: "Some twenty years ago, you lectured in a village where there was a state normal school. It was Sunday evening. At the hotel were three young men, and to see the girls of the college, these young men went to the lecture. One was the only son of a wealthy widow. He had not seen his mother for months. She had begged him to come home, but he was sowing his wild oats and ashamed to face his mother. That evening you made an earnest appeal to young men in the name of home and mother. The arrow went to the heart of the wild young fellow. On returning to the hotel he said to his companions: 'Come up to my room, let's have a talk.' On entering the room he closed the door and said: 'Boys, I want to open my heart to you. I am overwhelmed with a sense of wrong-doing. I am done with the saloon, done with the gambling table, done with evil associations. I am going home to-morrow and make mother happy. Boys, let's join hands and swear off from drink and evil habits; let's honor our manhood and our mothers.'
"Now for the sequel that I think will rest you. That wild boy is now a wealthy man. I give you his name, though I would not have you call it in public. He is a Christian philanthropist, and has never broken his pledge. The second boy holds the highest office in the gift of this government in a western territory, and the third stands before you now, an humble minister of the gospel."
It did rest me. I would rather have been the humble instrument in turning those three young men to a righteous life, than to wear the brightest wreath that ever encircled a stateman's brow.
For such men as Sylvester Long, Roland A. Nichols, Robert Parker Miles and Bishop Robert McIntyre to tell me my lectures helped to shape their lives, fills my soul with joy as I face the setting sun.
Chance, the noted English engineer, built a thousand sea-lights, shore-lights and harbor-lights. When in old age he lay dying, a wild storm on the sea seemed to revive him by its association with his life-work. He said to the watchers: "Lift me up and let me see once more the ocean in a storm."
As he looked out, the red lightning ripped open the black wardrobe of thefirmament, and he saw the salted sea driven by the fury of the hurricane into great billows of foam. Sinking back upon his pillows his last words were: "Thank God, I have been a lighthouse builder, and though the light of my life is fast fading, the beams of my lighthouse are brightening the darkness of many a sailor's night."
When my life-work closes, and my platform experiences are ended, I would ask no better name than that of an humble lighthouse builder, who here and there from the shore-points of life's ocean, has sent out a friendly beam, to brighten the darkness of some brother's night.
Joseph Cook said in one of his Boston lectures: "Whenever the temperance cause has attempted to fly with one wing, whether moral suasion or legal suasion, its course has been a spiral one. It will never accomplish its mission in this world, until it strikes the air with equal vans, each wing keeping time with the other, both together winnowing the earth of the tempter and the tempted."
I congratulate the friends of temperance upon the progress both wings have made since the beginning of their flight.
The first temperance pledge we have any record of ran thus: "I solemnly promise upon my word of honor I will abstain from everything that will intoxicate, except at public dinners, on public holidays and other important occasions." The first prohibitory law was a local law in a village on Long Island and ran thus: "Any man engaged in the sale of intoxicating liquors, who sells more than one quart of rum, whiskey or brandy to four boys atone time shall be fined one dollar and two pence."
A sideboard without brandy or rum was an exception, while the jug was imperative at every log-raising and in the harvest field. It was said of even a Puritan community,
"Their only wish and only prayer,In the present world or world to come,Is a string of Eels and a jug of rum."
"Their only wish and only prayer,In the present world or world to come,Is a string of Eels and a jug of rum."
"Their only wish and only prayer,
In the present world or world to come,
Is a string of Eels and a jug of rum."
When Doctor Leonard Bacon was installed pastor of the First Congregational Church in New Haven, Conn., in 1825, free drinks were ordered at the bar of the hotel, for all visiting members, to be paid for by the church. Today all protestant churches declare against the drink habit and the drink sale. Pulpits are thundering away against the saloon. Children are studying the effects of alcohol upon the human system in nearly every state in the Union. Train loads of literature are pouring into the homes of the people. A mighty army of as godly women as ever espoused a cause is battling for the home, against the saloon. The business world is demanding total-abstainers, and fifty millions of people in the United States areliving under prohibitory laws.
Not only in this but in every civilized land the cause of temperance is growing. Recently in France it was found there were more deaths than births, which meant France was dying. A commission was appointed to look into the causes. When the report was made, alcohol headed the list. Now by order of the government linen posters are put up in public buildings, and on these in blood red letters are these warnings: "Alcohol dangerous; alcohol chronic poison; alcohol leads to the following diseases; alcohol is the enemy of labor; alcohol disrupts the home!"
Who would have thought an Emperor of Germany would ever "go back" on beer? Emperor William in an address to the sailors recommended total-abstinence and forbid under penalty the giving of liquor to soldiers in the world's greatest war. The Czar of Russia has put an end to the government's connection with the manufacture of intoxicating liquors, and our Secretary of the Navy has banished it from the ships and navy yards. The New York Sun says: "The business world is getting to be one great temperanceleague." For many years it was confined to the realm of morals, but today it is recognized as a great economic question and the business world is joining the church world in solving the liquor problem.
While the temperance cause has been going up in character, the drink has been going down in quality. The old time distiller used to select his site along some crystal stream, that had its fountain-head in the mountains and ran over beds of limestone. With sound grain and pure water, he made several hundred barrels of whiskey a year, and after five to ten years of ripening, it was sent out with the makers' brand upon it. Now the North American of Philadelphia, one of our leading dailies says, rectifiers (and I would prefix one letter and make it w-r-e-c-k-t-i-f-i-e-r-s) take one barrel from the distillery and by a pernicious, poisonous process, make one hundred barrels from one barrel.
It is true the sting of the adder and the bite of the serpent were in the old-time whiskey, but it was as pure as it could be made. Doctor Wiley, Ex-Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry, says: "Eighty-five per cent. of all the whiskey sold in the saloons,hotels and club-rooms is not whiskey at all but a cheap base imitation." In the different concoctions made are found aconite, acquiamonia, angelica root, arsenic, alum, benzine, belladonna, beet-root juice, bitter almond, coculus-indicus, sulphuric acid, prussic acid, wood alcohol, boot soles and tobacco stems. No wonder we have more murders in this republic than in any civilized land beneath the sky in proportion to population.
Along with this adulteration of the drink has gone the degeneracy of the saloon and the seller. The day was when officers in churches could sell liquor and retain their membership. Today the saloonkeeper is barred from the protestant churches, barred from Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Red Men, Woodmen, Maccabees and nearly every other fraternal organization of the world.
The saloon itself has become such a vicious resort, that when the police look for a murderer they go to the saloon. When any vile character is sought for, the saloon is searched. When anarchists meet to plan for a Hay-market murder in Chicago, they meet in the saloon. When an assassin plans to shoot down our President atan exposition, he goes from the saloon. When a fire breaks out in Chicago or Boston the first order is, close the saloons. Don't close any other business house, but close the saloon. If a mob threatens Pittsburg, Cincinnati, or Atlanta, close the saloons. If an earthquake strikes San Francisco, close the saloons. In our large cities gambling rooms are attached to the saloons with wine rooms above for women, and while our boys are being ruined downstairs, girls are destroyed upstairs.
There are many thousands of women in painted shame, who would now be safe inside life's Eden of purity but for the saloon. The South Side Club of Chicago said in 1914: "The back rooms of four hundred and forty-five saloons on only three streets of this city contribute to the delinquency of fourteen thousand girls every twenty-four hours." Is it any wonder the saloons hide behind green blinds or stained glass windows?
There is a fish in the sea known as the "Devil Fish." It lies on its back with open mouth and covers itself with sea moss. Over its open mouth is a bait. When an unsuspecting fish nibbles at the bait, with a quick snap it is caught and devoured.Do you see any analogy between this fish and a certain business that hides itself behind painted windows or green blinds and hangs out a bait of "free lunch" or "Turtle Soup"? A fish that sets a trap for its kind is called a "Devil Fish;" a business that does the like is recognized as a legitimate trade and permitted for the sake of revenue.
Every other recognized business has improved in quality with the years. The saloon has grown worse and worse, until it is bad and only bad; bad in the beginning, bad in the middle, bad in the end, bad inside, outside, upside, downside. It is so bad, the liquor dealers are the only business men who are ashamed to put on exhibition their finished products. In great expositions other trades present finished wares. They do not display the tools used in making what they present for exhibition but the finished goods. Not so with the liquor dealers; they put on exhibition the tools with which they work, but not a single specimen of the finished product of their trade do they present for inspection.
"That's a fine fit of clothes you have, sir." "Yes," says the tailor, "I put up that job; glad you like my work."
"That's a fine building across the way." "Yes," says the architect, "that's my job and I am quite proud of it."
"That's a handsome bonnet you wear, madam." "Yes," says the milliner, "that's my creation of style and I am rather proud of my work."
Yonder is a man intoxicated. He staggers and falls; his head strikes the curb-stone; the blood besmears his face; the police lift him up and start with him to the station house. Did you hear a saloon keeper say: "That's my creation; I put up that job and I'm proud of my work."
Some one said recently in defense of the business: "The saloon keeper deserves more consideration." This writer should know that consideration has been the source of its undoing. Lord Chesterfield considered it and said: "Drink sellers are artists in human slaughter." Senator Morrill, of Maine, considered and pronounced it "the gigantic crime of all crimes." Senator Long, of Massachusetts considered it and called it "the dynamite of modern civilization." Henry W. Grady, our brilliant southerner, considered it and said: "It is the destroyer of men, the terror of women and the shadow on the face of childhood. It has dug more graves andsent more souls to judgment than all the pestilences since Egypt's plague, or all the wars since Joshua stood before the walls of Jericho." The New York Tribune considered it and said: "It's the clog upon the wheels of American progress." The Bible considered it and compares its influence to the bite of serpents, the sting of adders, the poison of asps, and heaps the woes of God's will upon it.
Sam Jones said: "When the Bible sayswoe, you better stop," and as certain as seed time brings harvest it will stop, not because of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, or the Anti-Saloon League, or the Prohibition Party, but because afar back in the blue haze of the past the seed of prohibition was planted in the soil of Divine truth.
Ever since God declared woe against the evils of mankind, the batteries of the holy Bible have been trained upon the "wine that gives its color in the cup," and the man who "giveth his neighbor drink and maketh him drunken also."
Itwillstop, because error cannot stand agitation. Whoever espouses the cause of error must evade facts, falsify figures, libel logic, tangle his tongue or pen withcontradictions and wind up in confusion.
The able editor of the Courier Journal of Kentucky came to the defense of this error, and with all his brilliancy and culture, he resorted to personal abuse of temperance workers,because he could not occupy a higher plane in defense of the saloon. He made up what he called an "ominum gatherum," of "bigots," "hay-seed politicians," "fake philosophers," "cranks," "scamps," "professional sharps," "mad caps of destruction," "preachers who would sell corner lots in heaven," "a riff-raff of moral idiots and red-nosed angels."
I could hardly believe my own eyes when I read this frantic phillipic from one I had esteemed so highly for his intellect; one whose element is up where eagles soar, and not down where baser birds feast upon rotten spots in a world of beauty. Only a few days before I had read his beautiful tribute to Lincoln, delivered at the unveiling in Hodgenville, in which he said of the great emancipator: "He never lost his balance or tore a passion to tatters," yet the finished orator who paid the tribute, when he espouses the cause of error, flies into a paroxysm of passion and tears the dignity of hisown self-control into shreds.
Knowing as I do the culture, refinement and polished manners of the great journalist, I wondered what aggravating force could have so unbalanced his mental scales and led him to so bitterly denounce those, whose only offense is, trying to do what Lincoln did, abolish an evil. If this resourceful writer were only converted to the truth on this question, what an "ominum gatherum" he could make from the work of the saloon curse.
The clergymen, called "canting, diabolical preachers," deserve more respectful consideration from one who well knows their sincerity. They are men of brains, heart and conscience; men who believe that righteousness rather than revenue exalts a nation, and that sin, no matter how much money invested in it, is a reproach to any people. These ministers believe it to be morally wrong to convert God's golden grain into what debases mankind. They preach that what is morally wrong can never be made politically right. With them it is a matter of deep, permanent conviction. Such attacks are made to divert attention from the accused at the bar of public opinion.
It is the saloon that is on trial, not cranks, or moral idiots, or ministers. The saloon is charged with being the enemy of every virtue and ally of every vice, that it injures public health, public peace and public morals. The Supreme Court says: "No legislature has the right to barter away public health, public peace or the public morals; the people themselves cannot do so, much less their servants."
In face of this declaration of the Supreme Court, legislators do barter away public health, public peace and public morals to the organized liquor traffic. All along the cruel career of this enemy of peace, health and morals, it has been pampered and petted by politicians who have been as much charmed by its promise of votes, as was Eve in the Garden of Eden by the serpent's assurance. Deceived by the serpent of the still, they have not only disregarded the decision of the Supreme Court but defied God's plan of dealing with sin. They have persisted in trying to regulate an irregularity in morals by licensing the greatest sin of the century, and have done so to their shame and failure in any regulation effort ever made. The only way to cure chills is to kill the malaria. The only way to curethe cursed liquor traffic is to cast it out of our civilization by a universal, everlasting prohibition of the manufacture, importation and sale of intoxicating liquor.
Rev. Howard Crosby, of New York, in advocating high license as a means of reducing the number of saloons, said in an address: "Suppose a tiger were to get loose in the city, would you not confine him to a few blocks rather than let him roam the city at large?" Some one in the audience answered aloud: "No Doctor, we would kill the tiger."
How does regulation regulate? Take the city of Louisville, Ky., where I resided a number of years, and where I observed the practical working of the license system. Go there any Monday morning and you will see from twenty to forty men and women in the cage next to the Police Court room. A marshal stands at the door of the cage and takes them out one at a time. You will hear the judge say: "ten dollars and cost," which means thirty days in the workhouse. Forty days pass and here is the same man in the Police Court: thirty days to serve his time, ten days to get a little money and then anotherdrunk. Some do not know how many times they have been before the court. I was there one day when an Irishman was arraigned. The Judge said: "Pat, how many times have you been before this court?"
"Faith, and your books will tell ye," replied the Irishman. Judge Price, the police judge at the time, said to me: "There are a number of men, and several women I know in this city, who pass through the courtroom on their way to the workhouse so regularly, I can guess within a few days of the time they will appear." They pass like buckets at a fire, going up full and returning empty.
There is an asylum in this country where, I am told, they test a man's insanity in this way. They have a trough which holds one hundred gallons of water. Above is an open tap through which the water pours constantly, and of course the trough keeps on running over. The patient is brought to the trough, given a bucket and told to dip out the water. If he dips all day and has not mind enough to turn off the tap, he is considered a very serious case. If this test were put to our license lawmakers, I fear they would haveto go to the incurable ward. They have for many years been picking up drunkards from the gutters and opening taps for them to keep on pouring into the streets. Under this system the saloon keepers are playing ten-pins. You know in playing ten-pins there is a long alley, at one end of which stand the pins, while at the other stands the player with a ball in his hand. He rolls the ball down the alley and knocks down the pins. Some one sets them up, and to that some one, who is often a boy, the player will toss a dime and say: "set them up quick." Does he let them stand? No! he rolls the ball down the alley and down go the pins. The saloon keeper has the ball of law in his hands. No matter whether a high or low license ball, he paid the price for the use of the ball. When temperance workers set up drunkards and they get a little money in their pockets away goes the ball and they are down again. When a church revival picks up a few drunkards the saloon keeper will say: "Here's a dollar to help in your meeting." Then in his mind he says: "Set up the drunkards who are out of employment and money, get them positions, and when they can earn moneyagain, again I'll bowl them down." Under the license system the saloon is playing ten-pins with temperance associations, ten-pins with the church and ten-pins with society. I have faith to believe the time is drawing near when the balls will be confiscated and the pins can stand when we do set them up.
I know many have not this faith because they believe prohibitory laws are failures. They base their belief on the violation of the law. By that rule everything is a failure. Married life is a failure; its laws are grossly violated. Home life is a failure; there are many miserable homes. The school is a failure; many a father has put thousands of dollars into the education of his son and found it wasted in riotous living. The church is a failure; many of its members are Christians only in name and not a few are hypocrites. But we know by the loyal, loving husbands and wives of every community that married life is not a failure. We know by the happy homes about us, with sweetest of household ties binding the family circle, that home life is not a failure. We know by the education that has refined our civilization, that the school isnot a failure. We know by the redeemed of earth and saved in heaven the church is not a failure, and we are convinced by the organized opposition to prohibitory laws by distillers, brewers, saloon keepers, gamblers and harlots that prohibition is not a failure.
If prohibition is a failure in Kansas as license advocates charge, then governors, ex-governors, attorney generals, jailers, mayors and judges of Kansas are falsifiers. If prohibition is a failure in Kansas why has the state grown to be the richest per capita in the Union, why are so many jails empty, so many counties without a pauper and why, according to the brewers' year book of 1910, was the consumption of liquor in Kansas one dollar and sixty cent per capita and in a neighbor license state twenty-two dollars per capita?
Along with the absurd statement that prohibition is a failure, comes the warning of the president of the Model License League to the business men of the country, that unless the tide of prohibition is arrested it will "kill our cities." "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord."
In a local option contest a prominent business man said to me: "I do not use liquor but I am in doubt about how I should vote on the question." When I asked; "What's your trouble?" he answered: "We have six saloons in this little city and the license fee is one thousand dollars; how are we to run the city without the six thousand dollars?" When I informed him that the six saloons took from the people eighty thousand dollars a year, he agreed it was a reasonable estimate. I said: "Don't you know those who spend their money for drink, if they did not spend it over the saloon bars, would spend it over the counters of merchants who sell clothing, food, fuel and furniture?" If you merchants could take in eighty thousand dollars, couldn't you pay out six thousand and not get hurt? If you can't see that you are no better business man than was Horace Greeley a farmer. He purchased a pig for one dollar, kept it two years, fed it forty dollars worth of corn and sold it for nine dollars. He said: "I lost money on the corn but made money on the hog." So, many business men see the revenue from the license fee but can't see the cost.
Suppose on one side of a street the business houses are all bad, in that they consume money and give worse than nothing in return; and on the other side they are all good, in that they give an honest equivalent for the money they receive; can't you see if the bad side is closed, the money that went to the bad side goes to the good, and can you not see only good can come of such a change?
There are three things prohibition of the saloon does that are illustrated by the story told of an Irishman who said: "I did three good things today."
"What did you do, Pat?"
"I saw a woman crying in front of a cathedral. She had a baby in her arms, and I said: 'Madam, what are you crying about?'
"She said: 'I had two dollars in me handkerchief and came to have me baby christened but I lost the money.'
"I said: 'Don't cry, Madam, here is a ten dollar bill; go get the baby christened and bring me the change.' She went, and soon after returned and handed me eight silver dollars."
"Well," said the friend, "I don't see any three good things in that."
"Ye don't! Didn't I dry the woman's tears, didn't I save the baby's soul, and didn't I get rid of a ten dollar counterfeit bill and get eight good silver dollars in return?"
That is what prohibition of the saloon does for a community. It dries woman's tears, saves human souls, gets rid of a counterfeit business and puts good business instead.
Is it a counterfeit business? It has been well said, "Go into the butcher stall and you get meat for money, into the shoe store and you get shoes for money, but go into the saloon and the bargain is all on one side. It's bar-gain on one side and bar-loss on the other; ill-gotten gains on one side, mis-spent wages on the other, a mess of pottage on one side and the birthright of some mother's boy on the other."
A great wail is going up from the advocates of the liquor traffic that statewide prohibition means the destruction of immense vested interests and dire results will follow.
"This our craft is in danger," has ever been the cry against reforms or changes in civilization since the "Shrine Makers of Ephesus."
When slavery was abolished it was said: "This means ruin to the South! Such a confiscation of property, with every slave set free to beg at the white man's gate, crushes every vestige of hope, and five hundred years will not bring relief." Only fifty years have passed and the South is richer than ever in her history.
Justice Grier of the Supreme Court said: "If loss of revenue should accrue to the United States from a diminished consumption of ardent spirits, she will be the gainer a thousandfold in health, wealth and happiness of the people."
If this is true, then this question is not only a great moral question but also a tremendous economic problem.
If production should be for use and not for abuse, the existence of breweries and distilleries are without excuse.
If one should be rewarded on the basis of service, the saloon keeper has no claim for even tolerance, much less reward.
If labor is the basis of value, men who live by selling liquor to their fellowmen are leaches on the body politic, and Ishmaels in the commercial world.
The claim that the liquor business is a benefit to a community or to the countryis in harmony with the assertion that war is a "biological necessity" and a "stimulating source of development."
General Sherman said: "War is hell." Certainly the one now raging between the leading nations of the old world is a hell of carnage. And yet intemperance has destroyed more lives than all the wars of the world since time began. It has added to the death of the body the eternal death of the soul and then the sum of its ravages is not complete until is added more broken hearts, more blasted hopes, desolate homes, more misery and shame than from any source of evil in the world. If what Sherman said of war is true, and the liquor curse is worse than war, how can this government hope to escape punishment for raising revenue from a business so abominable and wicked?
A heathen emperor when appealed to for a tax on opium as a source of revenue said: "I will not consent to raise the revenue of my country upon the vices of its people." Yet this Christian republic, claiming the noblest civilization of the earth, is found turning the dogs of appetite and avarice loose upon the home life of the republic that gold may clink inits treasury. The politician's excuse for this compromise with earth's greatest destroyer is, it can never be prohibited and therefore regulation and revenue is the best policy.
I can well remember when the same was said of slavery. With billions of dollars invested in slaves, with a united South behind it and the North divided, it could never be abolished. At that time the prospect for the overthrow of slavery was far less than the prospect of national prohibition today. I own I was among those who said "slavery cannot be destroyed." Now I am one of the reconstructed. I'm like the pig I used to read of, "When I lived I lived in clover, and when I died I died all over."
During the Civil War Union soldiers arrested several of my neighbors and took them to a northern prison. My southern blood was aroused. I said: "Let a Yankee soldier come to take me and he will never take another Kentuckian." Then my mother was alarmed. She knew how brave her boy was. A few days later I met a squad of Yankee cavalry on the road near our home. They said "Halt!" and I halted. They said "Surrender!" Idid so, and mother did not hear of any blood being shed.
Again a half-drunk Union soldier rode up to our gate and said: "Who lives here?" When I answered, he asked: "Can your mother get supper for fourteen soldiers in thirty minutes?" "No, sir, she cannot," I replied. Drawing a pistol, the mouth of which looked like a cannon's mouth to me, he said: "Maybe you have changed your mind." I had, and that supper was ready with several minutes to spare. We can, and wewillstop the liquor business. I am amazed, however, to find so many intelligent men of the North advocating the same policy on this liquor problem the South adopted on the slavery question, which cost her so severely. I find the same effect revenue in slaves had upon the consciences of the tax-payers of the South, high-license revenue from saloons is having upon the consciences of tax-payers in the North.
In the early days of slavery, when wealth in the institution was very limited, the conscience of the South was against slavery. Old Virginia, when a colony, appealed to King George to remove the threatening danger from her borders. Itwas the voice of a General Lee of Virginia that was lifted against slavery in the House of Burgesses. But with the passing of time slaves grew in value, until a slave in the South reached about the price of a saloon license now in the North. Then the conscience of the South quieted and slavery was justified by press, politics and pulpit. There is a remarkable analogy between the effect of a thousand dollar slave upon the conscience of South Carolina and a thousand dollar saloon upon the conscience of Massachusetts. The South paid the penalty of her mistaken policy; the North will reap its reward in retribution, if it persists in making the price of a saloon in the North the same as the price of a slave in the South. When the value of a world is profitless compared with the worth of a soul then even if every saloon were a Klondyke of gold this republic could not afford to legalize the liquor business for revenue.
I believe my northern friends will permit me to press home a little further the lesson of southern slavery. The phase I would impress is that any question that has a great moral principle involved is never settled until it is settled right. Wetried to regulate slavery but it wouldn't regulate. First it was decided that the importation of slaves should cease in twenty years. Did that settle it? Next came the Missouri compromise, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." Politicians said: "Now it's settled." But a fanatic in Boston name Garrison said: "It is not settled." Daniel Webster, as intellectual as some of our high license advocates of today said to Lloyd Garrison: "Stop the agitation of this question or you will bring trouble on the country; the compromise is made and the question is settled." Lloyd Garrison replied: "I don't care what compromise you've made; you may pull down my office, pitch my type into the sea, and hound me through the streets of Boston, but you will never settle the slavery question until you settle it right."
It kept breaking out despite all legislative restrictions. At last Columbia with one hand on her head, and the other on her heart, began to reel on her throne, and Abraham Lincoln seized his pen and signed the proclamation, "Universal Emancipation." Then the whole world said: "It's forever settled." So the liquorquestion will be settled as was the slavery question, by the universal, everlasting abolition of the manufacture, sale and importation of intoxicating liquor in this country.
High license is another Missouri Compromise. If you have the drink you'll have the drunkenness. If you have the cause you will have the effect. If you have the positive you will have the superlative: Positive drink, comparative drinking, superlative drunkenness. You may try high-tax and low-tax but all the time you will have sin-tax and more sin than tax.
You do not change the nature of the drink by the price of a license, the kind of a place in which it is sold or the character of the man who sells it. Put a pig in a parlor; feed him on the best the marflet affords, give him a feather bed in which to sleep, keep him there till he's grown and he'll be a hog. You don't change the nature of the pig by the elegant surroundings; you may change the condition of the parlor.
There is but one solution of the liquor problem and that is a nation-wide prohibitory law and behind the law a politicalpower in sympathy with the law and pledged to its enforcement.
Many admit the principle is correct but insist we should wait until public sentiment is powerful enough to enforce the law. If grand ideas had waited for public sentiment Moses would never have given the commandments to the world. If grand ideas had waited for public sentiment, we would still be back in the realm of the dark ages, instead of in the light of our present civilization; back in the dim twilight of the tallow-dip instead of the brightness of the electric light; back with the ox team instead of the speed of the steam engine, automobile and aeroplane; and on the temperance question back to where a liquor dealer could advertise his business on gravestones. On a tomb in England are these words: