Wit, humor, reason, rhetoric, prose, poetry and story woven into eight popular lectures

by George W. Bain

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 another drunk. 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 have to 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 money again, 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 is not 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.