It comes o'er the sense like a breeze from the sea, Oh, water, bright water, for me, for me! Fill to the brim! fill, fill to the brim ! For I, like the flowers, drink naught but dew. Fill again to the brim! again to the brim ! THE NATIONAL CONSTITUTION AND RUM. A. WILLEY. * * HE framers of our national Constitution carefully stated the objects for which they did their solemn work, and the people adopted it as their own: "We, the people of the United States, to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, to insure domestic tranquility * and to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, do ordain and establish this Constitution." Never had a nation besides such a foundation. It is all that Christianity commands of government and was the outcome of it. Now, arraign at this bar the horrible liquor crime of crimes, with all its domestic torments; its woes; its $1,100,000,000 of national destruction each year; its poverty, crimes, personal and public corruption; its savage war on the "general welfare," and disgrace to civilization; then close the indictment by counting up the 70,000 dead sent to perdition each year directly, and as many more indirectly by rum. Now, as a sworn juror, give the verdict: Are our constitutions responsible for this business? Has it any shadow of constitutional rights? Not a candid voice will say yes. It is directly hostile to it. But, stronger still, it is a fundamental principle of jurisprudence that nothing morally wrong can be constitutional or legal. That settles the case. Let the people rally upon this bed-rock and there again rescue our bleeding country from impending ruin to the glorious standard of the fathers, sweeping out forever its great woe and ruin, and a new morning will have dawned. THE VOTER'S RESPONSIBILITY. W. JENNINGS DEMOREST. an IRTUE, liberty and law are the acknowledged and essential elements of our civilization: Liberty to make law, law to protect liberty, and virtue to secure both. The rapid increase of crime and pauperism makes the prohibition of the liquor traffic indispensable for the life and hope of the country. The great question, therefore, now before the people is, How long shall we have our peace, our property and our lives jeopardized by this destructive traffic before we demand the enactment of a law for its suppression by the only possible method, the ballot? As this much-desired reform is dependent on the axiomatic principle that the necessity for prohibitory law depends on the injury the traffic does to the peace and happiness of the people, it is not necessary that all the people should immediately endorse it. All law is coercion and will have opposition from those whose passions or interests are involved. But to secure real and permanent success we must have no selfish or cowardly concessions of compromise or pretense of restriction in the way of a tax to make it respectable. These compromises help only to perpetuate the evil and do not diminish the amount of liquor sold. The only effective remedy is absolute prohibition. If it is admitted as a logical conclusion that an accessory to a crime is as bad as the criminal, the voter who by his ballot favors a sanction of the liquor traffic by licensing it is certainly responsible for the crime and poverty that the traffic produces. In all candor we ask, What is the difference between the crime of Judas Iscariot or the baseness of Benedict Arnold and the acceptance of one hundred thousand or one thousand dollars (payable in advance) to sanction a monstrous evil with a license; especially as the contrast between virtue and vice, beauty and deformity, health and disease, order and anarchy, life and death, are all so vividly illustrated by the blessings of prohibition as compared with the crime, misery and lawlessness that are caused by the law-protected liquor traffic? What would God think or what ought good men to think of a professed Christian whose intelligence makes him aware of the diabolism of the liquor traffic and yet does not prompt and compel him to express his condemnation where it can be most effective--at the ballot-box? Why can not we see the inconsistency of establishing churches in which to learn how to save our own souls, while by our votes we sanction temptations to destroy the souls of other men? The mother anxiously inquires, "Where is my boy to-night?" and when the truth is known he is in some licensed, gilded saloon authorized by his father's vote. But this duplicity and these stratagems for evading duty are not always to be the rules for our political life. The coming doom of the liquor traffic is written on the hearts and in the homes of the community in characters of blood, crime and misery. The premonitions of this moral uprising fill the air and will soon be echoing through their sovereign will expressed at the ballot-box: "This curse of all curses, the liquor traffic, must go." This terrible incubus on our civilization is to be suppressed and annihilated by the exercise of common sense, by common law, as a public nuisance, to shield the weak, the poor and the ignorant from their own imprudence. Personal responsibility must take the place of apathy, aggressive action of guilty complicity. Voter, what is your standard of morality on this vital question. Our country must have relief, our homes demand protection; all votes being units, will your vote count as one to secure this result and the numerous blessings that are certain to follow the prohibition of the curse of the liquor traffic? Your country's interests stand pleading for this vote. What will be your answer? I HAVE NO INFLUENCE? WH WHAT if the little rain should say: Can ne'er refresh those thirsty fields- Doth not each raindrop help to form THE WORN-OUT PARTIES. IF FRANCES E. WILLARD. F women had their way, and they intend to have it, the taint of alcohol and nicotine would not be on any lip or in any atmosphere of city, town or village on this globe. If they could have their way, and they intend to have it, the saloon-keeper would everywhere become an outcast. They do not stand for regulation of the traffic, not even for its prohibition, but for its annihilation. They stand for prohibition by law, prohibition by politics, prohibition by woman's ballot. Alcohol being preeminently a brain poison, men of most brain grow dizzy first and Hottentots stand steady longest. As civilization becomes complex, the brain acquires more convolutions to the square inch, and its delicate tissues are torn more ruthlessly by the coarse intruder alcohol. The more complex the civilization developed the more vital will it be that those who handle its fine mechanism shall have all their powers keenly trained. * * * The ship Republican has good timber in its hull, but the masts and spars of its leadership are struck by whiskey lightning. We must batter away at the most vulnerable points of the ship, break the old hull, and build the strong timbers of its best manhood into the prohibition ark. We want to hurt the Democratic party, especially in cities. We believe it to be leagued with the saloon, and its timbers are too worm-eaten to go into the ark prohibition. The deathwatch ticks in the disintegrating joints of the old whiskey-logged hull. Two outworn parties held together by an organized appetite for spoils are in their expiring agonies, and woe to those who come within the circle where they fight. God help us to be brave, to cry aloud and spare not, and to hold up wicked combinations to the execration they deserve. We stand as we always have stood for that party, by whatever name called, which makes prohibition the keystone of its arch. In some regions Democrats at the South and Republicans at the North have helped our cause. We recognize and rejoice in every such effort. But nationally we watch for the new party of moral ideas, even as they that watch for the morning-nay, more, we work for it; nay, most of all, we pray for it. |
