图书图片
PDF
ePub

zeal for a good cause, "We will vote with any party that will promise to prohibit the liquor traffic," I have been unable to go with them or to be willing to help in any trade of votes where conscience and principle ought to govern each vote.

The drink trade lifts its monstrous front of $750,000,000 of money spent directly in it, with an equal sum, in addition, taxed upon the people to take care of its miserable results. All the while the measure of its success depends on the deterioration, physical, mental, social, commercial and moral, of the entire nation, and on the utter ruin of an enormous number of thinking, feeling, suffering persons.

If the nation acted on the confessed sober thought of its representative men in every other walk in life, it would feel compelled to drive this trade from the fair face of this country as it would a pirate from our seas and oceans. This trade is a pirate against all righteous business. The greatest kindness to those engaged in it and to all connected with them is to compel them to take to other occupations. Such a course will surely add to instead of deducting from the value of all other business, and even though these other occupations do not bring in two hundred per cent. profit, yet they will not be sending many thousands every year to dishonored graves or to a life worse than death. Fire is a thing to be respected; but when it is claimed right to legalize a use of it that sets into a blaze multitudes of homes and destroys multitudes of minds that might otherwise be stars in the firmament of this nation's intellect, leaving only the white ashes of desolation as its best result, ought we to do nothing to prevent it?

I feel there has been no time like the present to take this great moral question away from being tossed between opposing parties and kicked by both, to a place by itself as a matter of imperative national concern. Protection to the labor and industry of the country must be given; but labor will always be mulcted in heavy taxation to keep demagogues howling for it and at the same time oppressing it while this nation legalizes, and so sanctions, the multitudes of drinking resorts, the effect of which on their frequenters is a befogged brain, a benumbed

conscience, and the steady transit of the toiler's earnings into the drink-seller's till.

There is dire need of protection for the workman's brain and the expenditure of his earnings. After that, labor will find that the true interests of capital and labor are identical. There is enough in the principles concerned, in the burning facts that can not be denied, and there is a shining goal to aim at—even the best welfare of this whole nation, of its homes that are more precious than all its gold and silver, its children and youth so infinitely beyond all other values. These are enough to equip all advocacy, enough to reach all hearts at last.

GOD IN GOVERNMENT.

WE

MRS. MARY T. LATHRAP.

E stand to-day the most thoroughly secularized government in the history of nations. We sneer at the "divine right of kings" and pride ourselves on the fact that we keep our religion and our politics entirely separate. Just as soon as we propose to put a moral principle into government, up go the cries, even from the church, "No union of church and State! No religion in politics!"

This dismissal of the thought of God in our government has brought our politics to the level of the saloon bar. How is the thought of God to be carried into the government? Only through the individual citizen. The citizen alone makes and unmakes our rulers and our laws. Why do most Christians pray like saints on Sunday and vote like devils on Monday? You may pray and exhort until you are old and hoarse, and you won't get your idea of God into government. Only when you have voted as the Holy Ghost dictates, have you any real power in government. In this country the individual citizen alone can carry divinity into government.

God has never let go His hold of human government, and in maintaining the saloon system we are taking issue with

Him. God's part in government has been from the first and is yet a reality. Every human government gets its authority from God's law. The Ten Commandments are the basis of our common law. Whenever we put a wrong principle into government, we take issue with God and God takes issue with us; and when God rejects any regnant power, nothing can save it.

But the

God has rejected the present reigning power. new ruler of our country has, like David, already been chosen and anointed. Prohibition is coming to the throne. It may come in peace or it may come in a storm of God's retribution. We have legalized a moral wrong, and God is on our track. Many of us can remember when slavery was generally admitted to be a moral wrong, and yet we delayed putting it down until God came and wet the hills with our choicest blood. To-day nobody says that the saloon is morally right, and yet we are compromising with it. What had Belshazzar done more than our rulers that he was warned by God's handwriting upon the wall?

PROHIBITION SONG OF GOOD FELLOWSHIP.

DE

MRS. LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY.

RINK, friends, the parting hour draws nigh,
Drink, and forget your care;

The sultry summer noon is high,

Drink, and your strength repair.

Spare not, there's plenty, take your fill:
We have a vineyard proud,-

A reservoir on vale and hill,

A fountain in the cloud.

Our flowing bowl is large, you see,

Lift high the song of cheer;

Our hearts are warm, our hands are free,
Drink deep and never fear.

Our Father Sun the example gives,
Our Mother Earth, also;
He drinketh sly, above the sky,
She, jocund, drinks below.

Pledge, friends, pledge deep before we part
To absent wife or daughter,

Or bright-eyed maid who rules your heart—
Drink deep, but only water.

NEED OF HEROISM TO-DAY

THA

ing

REV. A. MO ELROY WYLIE.

HAT was sage advice from the mouth of a sage whe exhorted young men to begin their career by espoussome righteous, unpopular cause. Nations and communities advance upon the lines of heroism. We owe to heroism the entire railway system with its romance of engineering and its sublime victory over obstacles, compared with which Hannibal's passage of the Alps was a boy's freak. It was the heroic element that cabled continents together and solved the problem of the unknown by sending messages beneath an ocean's waters.

But whilst we would not underestimate the heroic along the lines of discovery, invention and material progress, we can not overestimate the heroic needed along the lines of the social, the political, the moral and the religious. The former heroism stands as sponsor for the body, but the latter heroism takes its stand as both sponsor and guardian for mind and heart and soul-as much higher than the other as a Columbus is above the carpenter who built his craft.

In every nation the chief demand for heroism is along the line of those forces which relate to the formation and defense of character. What is heroism most heroic in one generation may be conservatism in the next. Looking at the issues

of the present hour, we find large blocks of heroic stock left unsubscribed for as yet. Young men, you have the chance of coming in "on the ground floor" now.

In our judgment there is one great issue before this nation, compared with which all others are as idle as the wind and as unprofitable as the tournaments of chess-players whose victims reckon nothing. The mighty question confronting this nation is whether the saloon shall go, or whether manhood and womanhood, the home and the church, shall go. It would be unmanly to minify the fact that true heroism is called for to confront this monster. In the mill of its maw all that is precious to mortality or to immortality goes down in stale debauch and ruin. Who has not seen houses and lands, bodies and raiment and home, reputation and honor, heart and hope-all ground up and swallowed down in the hell of that cruelty which knows no pity and never cries, Enough?

It may take a St. George to kill the dragon, but here is a myriad-headed monster which demands the enlistment of five million voters and pleaders to campaign for prohibition and to uphold the principle when it is incorporated into law and constitution.

We emphasize principle, and why? First, because you can not settle anything until it is settled right, and ten thousand times it has been demonstrated that high license, low license, or no license can not settle the drink question. What is vicious in principle and powerless as a remedy is doomed in the court of heaven and in the court of man's conscience, and ought to be and must be outlawed in human government. Secondly, you can not raise and maintain enthusiasm without you fire your question with a burning principle. Prohibition absolute is the only expedient that rests squarely on principle. All other expedients are compromises, and compromises fight with one hand or both hands tied behind the back. They excite the contempt of the enemy and invite defeat. Without a principle, no abiding enthusiasm; without enthusiasm, no heroism; and without heroism, no victory!

« 上一页继续 »