bined, and the license was granted. Ah! how hundreds of our officers cower before this strutting Goliath of iniquity. But I must hurry on. In leaving this branch of the subject. I wish to cite overwhelming proof of the vast injury to the public service resulting from the power and influence of the liquor forces. The boldest, cruelest and most rapacious trust in existence, is the beer trust. The law is its plaything, rapacity is its watchword, and our homes are its victims. Yet, 'midst all the hundreds of prosecutions dissolving and destroying trusts, this beast of monopoly, devouring our boys and polluting our civilization, remains unharmed. The brewer is our greatest criminal, violating more positive statutes than any other malefactor in the land, and yet he is immune to punishment. VII. The saloon should be destroyed because destruction is the only remedy. It is a continuing, irrepressible evil, and nothing short of annihilation will suffice. We are met here with the favorite argument of the advocates of the saloon-"regulation." But the argument is unsound. It will not stand the test of reason and logic, and is quickly answered. As we have already seen, the saloon is a criminal-the proproducer of more crime than all other causes combined. It is axiomatic that, to regulate by law, of necessity implies to legalize. But law cannot legalize crime. Law is enacted for the express purpose of suppressing crime. The moment law legalizes crime its purpose is gone and it ceases to be law. Put differently, the instant law legalizes crime it becomes an accessory before the fact and is a criminal itself. The gulf between crime and law is as impassible as that between Dives in torment, and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. VIII. The saloon should be destroyed because it is the enemy of our Christian civilization. In the rush and hurly-burly of modern life, many citizens fail to study our form of government and acquaint themselves with the great fact that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors made Christianity part and parcel of our institutions. Not only does it permeate the three great branches of our government, the legislative, executive and judicial branches, but it is a part of our law. The sages of the common law, our priceless inheritance, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Blackstone, and others have so declared, and our courts have followed them. The Supreme Court of Missouri has declared that this is a Christian Common wealth. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that this is a Christian Republic. Viewed from every standpoint, ours is a Christian civilization. The saloon is bent upon its destruction. Its black-plumed legions, with their red flags, are mustering from ocean to ocean. Time and again in their national war councils, they have openly denounced our Christian civilization. With uplifted hands, wet with the blood of our boys, they have sworn they will destroy it. They have passed resolutions and have published them in the press of the nation, calling upon men to desecrate the Sabbath, and deliberately advising them to trample under foot laws enacted for its protection. Their purpose is to make God's holy Sabbath a holiday, when the church bell shall hush, the song of praise be drowned out by the yells of the drunken procession, and the house of worship give way to the beer garden. The State, to which the Almighty has given the civil power and charged with the duty of protecting the Church, has proven recreant to its trust, and for money is legalizing the despoilers of our homes and our families, the basis of our civilization. But down the centuries when the State has failed, God has ever called the Church to come to the field of battle, for after all, in the darkest hours and in the bloodiest struggles, it has been the Church and not the State that has borne in the van the flag of liberty and civilization. God is calling now, and the soldiers of the Cross are coming. The white plume of the Man of Gallilee is leading. The war between the Church and the saloon is on, unending as that between Rome and Carthage. Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones in the valley shall yet be realized on American soil, when God shall vivify the dry bones of His sleeping warriors, and bone shall come to bone and flesh to flesh till "there shall stand upon their feet an exceeding great army" that shall put to flight forever the hosts of the god of wine. IX. The saloon should be destroyed because it is the enemy of business prosperity. We come now to the last stand made by the advocates of intoxicating liquor. Routed everywhere else, they seek refuge in economics. Their argument is that there can be no business prosperity where the liquor traffic is eliminated. Let us examine this argument briefly but carefully, for upon it rests the last hope of the saloon. We have seen upon overwhelming evidence that intoxicating liquor produces eighty per cent of all crime. Now that Almighty God, Who presides over the destinies of nations, Who is specifically recognized in the preamble to the Constitution of Missouri, and whose guidance is invoked in the Declaration of Independence, has never permitted prosperity and crime to go together. All down the ages the nations of this old world of ours have prospered in precise proportion to the virtue of their citizenship. When they have become corrupt and given over to crime they have perished. It is an insult to the truth of history and to an overruling Providence to say that prosperity and crime go hand in hand. "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." But let us arraign this false argument at the bar of observation and experience. I defy any man to point me to a State, county or municipality, where the saloon has been banished, that has not been made more prosperous thereby. The nine prohibition States in the Union are among my witnesses. I have only time to call one of them to the stand, our immediate neighbor and the one we know best, the State of Kansas. Within the recollection of many men now living, this State was regarded as a part of the "Great American Desert," inhabited by coyotes, jack rabbits and prairie dogs. After the Civil War there poured into this Commonwealth rugged, indomitable sober men. In 1880 they passed their prohibitory amendment, which was upheld by Judge Brewer then of the Kansas Supreme Court, and afterwards upheld on appeal, by the Supreme Court of the United States. After thirty-three years of prohibition, Kansas has become one of the great wheatgrowing and corn-growing States of the Union. It has in its banks the largest per capita amount of money of any State in the Republic. The white steam of the locomotive is streaming over its plains and up and down its valleys, and the honk of the automobile never ceases on its prairies. It now contains 1,690,949 inhabitants, a happy, prosperous, law-abiding people. Its attorney general, Hon. John S. Dawson, published a few months ago the following statement: "With 105 counties in the State, eighty-seven of them have no insane, fifty have no feeble-minded, ninety-six have no inebriates, and the few we have come from the cities which defied the law to the last. Thirty-eight county poor houses have no inmates, and there is only one pauper to every 3,000 population. In July, 1911, fifty-three jails were empty; sixty-five counties had no prisoners serving sentences. In 1880 when prohibition was adopted Kansas was an exceedingly poor State. In thirty-three years it has become the richest State in the Union, per capita." In Missouri the cities and towns that have abolished the saloon have been far more prosperous than under the debauching reign "The habit of using ardent spirits by men in ofifce has occasioned more injury to the public, and more trouble to me, than all other sources. And were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask a candidate for office would be: 'Does he use ardent spirits?"-THOMAS JEFFERSON. NOTE: It goes without saying that Mr. Jefferson favored temperance in the private citizen. |