Yonder on the ocean a vessel springs a leak and soon the water stands thirty inches deep in the hold. The captain says: "To the pumps!" and the sailors leap to their places. At the end of one hour the captain measures and says: "Thirty inches; you are holding it down." Hour after hour the pumping goes on, with changing hands at the pumps, and hour after hour the captain says: "You are doing well; she can't go down at thirty inches. Hold it there and we'll make the harbor." Twenty hours and the captain shouts: "Thirty inches; and land is in sight. Pump on, my boys, you'll save the ship." Suppose one of our croakers who says, "Prohibition won't prohibit," had been on board. He would have said: "Don't you see you are doing no good; there's just as much water as when you began." What would have become of the ship?
At the close of the Civil War intemperance was pouring in upon the Ship of State. Men returned from war enthralled in chains worse than African slavery, for rum slavery means ruin to body and soul. Men, women and children ran to the pumps, and thank God, state after state is going dry. Soon we'll see the land of promise, and the Ship of State will be saved from a leak as dangerous as ever sprung in a vessel, and from as cruel a crew of buccaneers as ever scuttled a ship.
When I began the work as a "Good Templar" forty years ago, Kentucky was soaked in rum. Bourbon county, where I was reared, had twenty-three distilleries, and a dead wall lifted itself against my hopes of ever seeing the sky clear of distillery smoke above old Bourbon county, a name on more barrels and bottles, on more bar-room windows, and on the memories of more drunkards in ruin than any other county in the world. Yet I have lived to see the last distillery fire go out, and Bourbon county dry. While I had faith in the ultimate triumph of the Cause I never dreamt it would come to Bourbon county in my lifetime.
When I began saloons were at almost every crossroads village, and the bottle on sideboards was the rule in thousands of leading homes. Time and again my life was threatened. On one occasion twelve armed men guarded me from a mob, and once my wife placed herself between my body and a desperate mountaineer. Those were perilous times for an advocate of temperance in my native state. Now out of one hundred and twenty counties, one hundred and seven are dry. In Georgia the licensed saloon is gone; in North Carolina the saloon is gone; in West Virginia, Old Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee the saloon is gone, while Oklahoma was born sober.
"That which made Milwaukee famous
Doesn't foam in Tennessee;
The Sunday lid in old Missouri
Was Governor Folk's decree.
Brewers, distillers and their cronies