The New Democracy: A handbook for Democratic speakers and workers

by Walter Vrooman

The young man referred to is a typical specimen of a sniveling, impracticable and worthless counterfeit of religion, the only function of which is to emasculate and weaken our youth. It serves to ease their consciences and displace the instincts that prompt to goodness. For courageous self-sacrifice, it substitutes the mumbling of prayers; instead of active, righteous contact with the world it demands the attendance at meetings in which love is expressed toward a phantasy millions of miles up into the stars, while the Living God of Heaven and earth is forgotten, and where imprecation, denunciation and charges of wickedness are dealt out to those manly and courageous persons who lift out a helping hand to the poor instead of praying for them and who fight to make this world and this life heavenly instead of paying their debts to their fellow creatures with mansions in the skies.

The refusal of this young man who, according to his own statement, believed that the future welfare of the Nation depended upon the triumph of the principles represented by Mr. Bryan, to assist in spreading those principles in saloon meetings, means that his religious and social training had unfitted him to do any great or noble thing, unless in conformity with his Sunday-school manufactured tastes as to nicety and elegance.

The young man sees the giant tree, injustice, and offers to assist in cutting it down but, when we hand him an ax, refuses to take off his coat and returns it saying that his little hatchet at home has a blue ribbon around it and that he won't cut with any other.

He sings "Rescue the Perishing" at the Christian Endeavor meeting, a pretty girl with pink cheeks and cherry lips on each side. The cheeks and lips and song are so pleasing, he thinks he will go further and help rescue the perishing. After careful study he is satisfied that people are perishing for want of his friendly services and the services of others like himself. Yet, when he is assigned a place to work, he abruptly leaves his post of duty and goes back to prayer meeting, because, poor boy, no carpet is on the floor, no angel pictures grace the wall, and the tobacco smoke about him is offensive.

Innocent creature! Let him continue to sing his hymns and say his prayers surrounded by pretty girls In the Christian Endeavor meeting and pretty boys who should have been born girls, while the great forces of reform fight the battles of the living God, conquer evil, destroy injustice and lift up the fallen. We can do without him and without his kind.

Not that we want to. We do not. We need all possible help. We will not judge harshly all those who now are given over to such innocent amusements. For the delicate white hand, the girlish student face, the timid mamma's boy, taken from the prayer meeting and the Christian Endeavor Society, once taught to see the great truths of social salvation and human progress, does not always retreat in holy horror when confronted with conflict and the smoke of battle. On the other hand, such timid, singing, praying boys often become National heroes. Before manhood is discovered by the growth of hair on the face, manly character sometimes reaches maturity, with qualities developed, not only superior to tobacco smoke at a saloon meeting, and the naughty cuss words of the fellows who drink there, but to the smoke of powder and the thunder of cannon.

Do not overlook nor belittle soft men, but ignore only those who stay soft after you have tried the hardening process. For where one heart may be formed of milk and water, the liquid state of another may be that of molten steel, and may only require the cooling process of an outdoor breeze to make it withstand the continuous persecution and conflict of years.

There is no unholy place where men should not go who are fired by a passion for justice. It is a fact that one of the centers of the social life of the great cities of America and of Europe is the liquor saloon. How much we may deplore this fact or the evil results that we see flowing from it, is entirely another question. The fact remains in spite of our deploring, our shocked ideals or our sympathies wrung by the desolation and death caused by it, that the center of the social life of our great cities, the place where society meets, (not that floating, top-heavy buoy that calls itself society, but real society, the people) is the liquor saloon.

At present it is managed in America, not with any reference whatever to its social function, but merely for the private profit of individuals. In order to increase their private profits and to defend their special interests, the men who manage these saloons, as a general rule, abuse their powers and add inconceivably to the horrors of the vice of intemperence trying, by unnatural and vicious methods, to increase their gain.

Not only this, but as the saloon is the center of the social life of our American cities, the proprietors of saloons and the manufacturers of liquors, who have associated their interests, have a terrible and unnatural advantage in controlling the political power of the people with whom they come in contact. They do not have to go where the people are because the saloon keeper, in the natural and usual performance of his business, is already in the midst of the people. He always has a crowd. He is the greatest preacher of modern times. He does not have to invent new methods for REACHING THE MASSES. He does not have to scratch his bald head and say, "O, Lord! why are my sheep deserting me?" The saloon keeper always has a congregation, always a choir, is always surrounded by men in need of a friend, and, like other members of the human family having a strange mixture of greed and sympathy, cruelty and fellow-feeling, he exercises his charitable instincts and lends a material helping hand to the members of his congregation quite as often as do the five thousand and twenty thousand dollar a year ministers who preach not to men drinking, but often to men who have already drunk their fill.