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sound in a marble gambling palace from what it would have in a mud cabin? Is the demoralization less because the table is mahogany instead of pine? Are the suicides that result from gambling fewer in proportion behind marble porticoes than wooded casements? By no means. It is the effect of the gambling passion on brain and heart, on health and home, that makes it an unmingled curse; and its surroundings have as little power to change that effect as have the clothes we wear to change the color of our eyes.

It is at this point that the argument of our high-license friends exhibits its fatuity and folly. For the only real values possessed by the State are its citizens. What ruins them, ruins the State. Now, whiskey has precisely the same effect upon the citizen whether it is poured from a broken bottle or a cut-glass decanter. He may enter the place where it is sold through a carved door or one made of refuse lumber; he may stand before a rosewood bar or one of unplaned boards; he may swallow the draught of which alcohol is the fascinating ingredient from a silver goblet or a cracked tumbler; the men about him may wear broadcloth or blue jeans; the State may get twenty-five or five hundred dollars for the license-all these are outside facts. The inside fact outweighs them all; the physical harm; the moral degeneracy— these are just the same in the low-licensed groggery and the high-licensed saloon.

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When we want meat we go to the market, without stopping to calculate whether it is one block or three blocks away, without reflecting as to the number of markets in the town. how much more will the thoughtless and the bewildered youth, or the man who is under the fascination of the drink habit, make his way to the place where his craving can be gratified.

The same reason holds as to the evil effects upon society. The cross-grained conduct of the moderate drinker is not modified by the surroundings amid which he imbibed the poison that clouded his moral perceptions. The curse and ribaldry of the inebriate are just the same when he has swallowed the high-licensed liquor as if it had been low-licensed.

The blow he gives to wife and child sting none the less because the man who sold him beer or whiskey paid four times as much for the permission as had been required of him the year previous. Poverty, disease, disgrace and crime, these are not lessened by high license, as is proved by observation and statistics, but most of all from the nature of the case; hence, high license is a notorious fallacy and failure.

This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter as between licenses high and low: Of two evils choose neither. Christian voter, friend of humanity, repeat those words; let them resound, reecho and reverberate through every avenue of conscience, Of two evils choose neither.

FOUGHT AND WON.

H

M. A. MAITLAND.

E stood with a foot on the threshold,
A cloud on his boyish face,
While his city comrade urged him
To enter the gorgeous place.

"There's nothing to fear, old fellow!
It isn't a lion's den;

Here waits you a royal welcome

From lips of the bravest men."

'Twas the old, old voice of the tempter,
That sought in the old, old way

To lure with a lying promise

The innocent feet astray.

"One would think it was Bluebeard's closet,
To see how you stare and shrink!
I tell you there's nothing to harm you,
It's only a game and a drink.”

He heard the words with a shudder,
"It's only a game and a drink!"

And his lips made bold to answer,

"But what would my mother think?"

The name that his heart held dearest
Had startled a secret spring,
And forth from the wily tempter
He fled like a hunted thing.

Away! till the glare of the city
And its gilded halls of sin
Were shut from his sense and vision
The shadows of night within.
Away! till his feet had bounded

O'er fields where his childhood trod;
Away! in the name of virtue

And the strength of his mother's God!
What though he was branded "coward"
In the blazoned halls of vice,
And banned by his baffled tempter,
Who sullenly tossed the dice?

On the page where the angel keepeth
The record of deeds well done,
That night was the story written
Of a glorious battle won.

And he stood by his home in the starlight,
All guiltless of sword and shield,

A braver and nobler victor

Than the hero of bloodiest field!

HOW TO SUCCEED.

WE

T. C. RICHMOND.

E are living in a time in the history of the United States when one party, having done its work, is passing away, and when the people, ready for another step in the upward march of the race, are reorganizing the social and

political forces to right public wrongs and to remedy public evils. But how shall we get this new party? Go out and organize it. Out of what? Out of the heart and brain and higher life of America. This fight can be won only by an appeal to the cultured mind and the elevated moral sense of the American people.

Since a political party in this country is, in its highest and fullest sense, a national institution, our party must be organized in every State and Territory. The laws for the enactment and enforcement of the principle for which we stand must prevail over every foot of soil over which our people claim the right to sovereignty. View this question as we will, it is national. The evil we seek to remedy is national. The influence of the saloon is national. The agencies it is using to perpetuate its existence are national. The institutions it threatens to overthrow are national. Our movement to destroy that evil, to counteract that influence, and to save those institutions must be national, or it will end in miserable failure.

The American people like pluck. They admire untiring energy and indomitable purpose. They will not be, they can not be, indifferent if we go at this work with an intense earnestness that removes all obstacles, surmounts all difficulties, and refuses to recognize in the vocabulary of the reformer such a word as 66 'failure." Our great work is to overcome this indifference. Once get the people of this nation aroused to this subject, once get their attention fixed on this great reform, once get our banner so high in the heavens that all can see it, and we have made a wonderful advance toward final victory.

I believe profoundly that the American Ship of State is freighted with the hopes and aspirations not only of our own. people, but also of all men and women everywhere who understand the full measure of the words "home" and "liberty." If this great nation of ours is to be redeemed from rum's curse and the unmentioned and unmentionable evils that follow in its slimy track; if our institutions so

highly cherished are to be preserved and strengthened; if man is to advance to a higher civilization than we have ever yet known that new party must come to the front and enact and enforce righteousness and law. And if this new party is to come to the front, you and I must help place it there.

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THE CURSE OF DRINK.

REV. T. DEWITT TALMAGE, D.D.

the water,

OAH did the best and the worst thing for the world. He built an ark against the deluge of water, but introduced a deluge against which the human race has ever since been trying to build an ark-the deluge of drunkenness. While we must confess that some of the ancient arts have been lost, the Christian era is superior to all other eras in the bad eminence of whiskey, rum and gin. The modern drunk is a hundredfold worse than the ancient drunk. Noah in his intoxication became imbecile, but the victims of modern alcoholism have to struggle with whole menageries of wild beasts and jungles of hissing serpents and perditions of blaspheming demons.

Drunkenness is the greatest evil of this nation, and it takes no logical process to prove that a drunken nation can not long be a free nation. Drunkenness and free institutions are coming into a death-grapple. Either drunkenness will be destroyed in this country or the American Government will be destroyed.

Oh, how many are waiting to see if something can not be done. Thousands of drunkards waiting who can not go ten minutes in any direction without having the temptation glaring before their eyes or appealing to their nostrils, they fighting against it with enfeebled will and diseased appetite, conquering, then surrendering, conquering again and sur

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