MOST people have heard of the man who in a difficulty with a vicious bull finally got the animal by the tail. He could not hurt the brute, yet he did not dare to let go, so he was slung about most unmercifully, and at last accounts he was still being slung. The bull was in the wrong, the man in the right; still he had the animal only by the tail: instead of quieting or frightening the brute, he merely made him angry and was severely punished for his well-meant efforts.
The people of the United States in their contest with the rum power are in the position of the man with the bull. The rum power is in the wrong; the people are in the right, yet they have the monster only by the tail, so they only worry him and make misery for themselves.
It is not necessary to recount the harm done individuals and families by the liquor traffic. Almost every charge that the most rabid prohibitionist makes can be substantiated by a thousand men who sell liquor, aside from what total abstainers may know or believe or imagine.{289}
Image not available: RESIDENCE HON. POTTER PALMER.
RESIDENCE HON. POTTER PALMER.
Bishop Warren, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, is not an excitable man, but he does not overstate the truth at all when he says: “Innumerable are the crimes of dolorous and accursed ages, and a fruitful source of them all is intemperance. It robs the body of its strength, the senses of their delicacy, the mind of its acuteness, the spirit of its life. It fires every passion, makes every base appetite the master of mind and will, leaves man an utter wreck. Of its work there are frightful statistics of robberies, arsons, murders, insanities, and curses to the third and fourth generations; but there are no statistics that can measure the heartbreaks of wives, hungers of children, disappointments of fond parents, and physical inheritance of deterioration and unconquerable appetite. It is the one great, stark, crying curse of our race and age. It is the personal foe of every parent, Sunday-school teacher, and preacher of righteousness.”
Miss Frances Willard, who is doing more successful temperance work than any man who is in the same field at present, states the case as earnestly as Bishop Warren, and with the extra force which figures always give—figures which no one contradicts because no one can. She says: “No man of the smallest intelligence can be ignorant of the fact that the saloon is to-day the chief destructive force in society; that the cumulative{290} testimony of judge, jury, and executive officers of the law declares that fifty per cent. of the idiocy and lunacy, eighty per cent. of the crimes, and ninety per cent. of the pauperism come from strong drink; that the saloon holds the balance of power in almost every city of ten thousand inhabitants; that it is the curse of workingmen and the sworn foe of home.”
It isn’t necessary, either, to call attention to the harm done free institutions at election times by the influence of rum. The late “Petroleum” Nasby, whom all of us knew for a lovable fellow and an able editor, once consumed a gallon of whiskey a day on the average. When he stopped drinking he wrote a series of temperance editorials, concluding with the words “Paralyze the rum power.” “Pete” had been in politics himself: he knew what the “power” of rum was, and how it was used.
The demoralizing effect of plenty of liquor is so well known that the first duty of a local campaign manager, no matter of which party, is to make proper arrangements with rum-shops for supplying free drinks for the purpose of changing voters’ views. The man who has opinions, no matter what they may be, is quite likely to modify them if asked when he is under the influence of a few drinks; and if his liquid consolation is to be supplied at the expense of some other man, the opinions of the two are likely to{291} be in entire accord before the transaction is concluded. Votes are easier purchased with rum than with money, no matter how large the sum that may be at the disposal of any political boss or ward committee. The public heard, a few years ago, to its horror, that an important State had been carried for the victorious party by a general distribution of new two-dollar bills. The truth is, as any one can learn by visiting the districts which then were close in the State alluded to, that a great deal more money than the entire number of two-dollar bills amounted to had previously been expended in rum-shops to which men who were willing to listen to what was called “a fair presentation of conflicting views” could be persuaded to come. Liquor is cheaper in the western States than in large cities. It is worse, too. A little of it goes a long way, and the man who will spend an evening in a rum-shop in a rural locality, is equal to any enormity, compared with which an apparent change of sentiment on political subjects is a mere trifle. As Channing used to say, “Rum outwits alike the teacher, the man of business, the patriot, and the legislator.”
Stepping aside from sentiment, and coming down to practical facts, Rev. Theodore Cuyler says that the liquor question “enters more immediately into the enrichment or the impoverishment of the national resources than any question{292} of tariff or currency. More money is touched by the drink traffic and the effects of the traffic than by any other trade known among men. The tax upon national resources levied by the bottle is far heavier than the combined taxes for every object of public well-being.”
Statistics of drink are undoubtedly more appalling than those of the most bloody and senseless war that the world ever knew. Some that are published are entirely untrustworthy; a head for reform does not always mean a head for figures; so figures are often made to lie, like tombstones. But the truth is bad enough. It is plain to any man who knows anything about current values that the price of a glass of poor beer will buy a pound of good bread, and the price of a glass of best whiskey will buy a pound of the best meat. Yet a great deal more money goes for beer and whiskey than for bread and meat.
Why?
Depraved appetite, answers the professional moralist. This is the veriest nonsense, although it is the commonest of the reasons that are given for inordinate indulgence in stimulants. An appetite, properly speaking, must be of a fixed nature. There is no drunkard alive who has a fixed appetite for liquor. The depraved appetite, so-called, is an occasional manifestation of the influence of long indulgence in alcoholic stimulants,{293} but it is no more possible to prolong it and make it a fixed condition of a man’s life than it is for a human being to make a voyage to the moon.
The first purpose of drink, to any one who is beginning to use liquor, is to “feel good,” and there is no denying that this is a general longing in every grade of humanity, from the highest to the lowest. Most human beings of the lower order are full of physical defects, all the way from those of the muscles and joints to those of the vital organs and nerves. If you ask the southern field-hand how he feels, you may safely bet that he will answer, “pooty porely,” and to get relief from his aches and pains he resorts to liquor, whenever he can get it. The Indian is another specimen of the man who wants to “feel good.” He is supposed to be physically a splendid child of nature, but he seldom is without some serious functional disorder or inherited curse of the flesh which makes him the willing slave of any stimulant he can get. A great host of unfortunates who have come to the United States from other lands are practically in the same condition; starved, abused, and underfed for generations and centuries, a glass of rum is to them like the touch of an angel, and a jugful is the equivalent of a heavenly host. There is no sense in talking about “depraved appetites” when you contemplate these people, from whom come the mass of the rumseller’s customers.{294}
The second strong impulse to drink is like unto the first; it is to “brace up.” Human nature is either a dreadfully weak machine, or one which the majority persist in overworking. Men’s energies, spurred by their necessities, too often outrun their strength; then stimulation will be resorted to if it is at hand. It is quite true to say there is more strength, and stimulus too, in a loaf of bread or pound of meat than in a glass of liquor; but the food works slowly; the liquor works quickly. There are drinkers almost innumerable among the better classes, who use liquor medicinally, as literally as other men use quinine. Their liquor habit never is an indulgence; they would as lieve take some other stimulant were it equally convenient and effective, but they do not know of any; neither do their doctors.
When men feel the need of stimulation, yet dread the use of alcohol, they will search for help somewhere else. With the nominal decay of the rum influence in the United States some years ago, began the enormous sale of bitters, anodynes, narcotics, stimulants, nerve foods, brain foods, and other nostrums of similar purpose, with which the advertising columns of a great many newspapers, including most of the religious weeklies, were filled, as some are at the present time. In the city of New York, where there is one rum shop to every thirty families, it is not a common{295} experience to smell opium or chloral in the breath of the man next you in church or street-car or business resort. But in the State of Maine, which has had more experience with close prohibition than all the other States of the union combined, it is hard to go into any community of men without being made cognizant of the fact that resort to these stimulants is quite common in that virtuous State. I do not say this in conte............