Sam Jones said: "When the Bible says woe, 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."
It will stop, because error cannot stand agitation. Whoever espouses the cause of error must evade facts, falsify figures, libel logic, tangle his tongue or pen with contradictions 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 his own 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 cure the 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.