SUNDAYISMS ON BOOZE

[Appeared in a 1908 newspaper.]

—The curse of God is already on the saloon, sir.

—This nation can’t long exist half drunk and half sober.

—Every anarchistic plot is hatched out in a grog shop.

—To license such a dirty incarnation is the meanest thing on earth.

—If I were a devil, I would rather dwell in a good decent body than in some men I know.

—I don’t rate the saloon as a legitimate business; I don’t care a rap if the law does.

—Of the 106 counties in prohibition Kansas, only twenty-five of them have an inmate in their jails.

—If all the whiskey-orphaned children stood hand in hand, they would belt the old globe five times around.

—A banker in Kansas City, Kans., said that after one year of prohibition his bank had over a million of new deposits.

—The food to feed your family well is in the grocery stores, but you spend your money over the bar and your family goes hungry.

—Let the farmers of the United States get a whack at the saloons, and they will send it to hell at the first smack out of the box.

—The saloon is a sneaking coward; it stabs in the back; it works in the dark; it beats out right against every man that it cannot debauch.

—The beef steak your wife and children ought to have are in the butcher shop, but you carry home a load of booze instead of the meat.

—I defy the whole damnable gang (of saloon people) to come up and show anything in my life that is not in accordance with that old book.

—There are three towns in Kansas which openly defy prohibition laws, and the population of those towns is constantly on the decrease.

—It is up to you, men of Bloomington, you men of Normal, men of Illinois, to say that your damnable period of perdition and corruption shall end.

—I have as much respect for the saloon keeper as I have for the man who votes for the business, or the man who rents his buildings for the business.

—The farmers are not such a disgraceful gang that they won’t go to a town to trade unless they can fill their hides with booze like a Comanche Indian.

—To license a business that will take bright American boys and manufacture them into sots, insane patients and criminals is the dirtiest business on earth.

—The saloon could not exist if it wasn’t for the church. When the members of all the churches get ready to act together against them they send it to hell in twenty-four hours.

—It (the liquor traffic) is a thief; it steals the coffin from the dead; it steals the milk from the breast of the nursing mother; it steals the last nickel from the starving child. It’s a dirty thing robbing our land and our homes.

—It (the liquor traffic) has no faith in God; it would close every church; it would hang its sign in every choir loft and from every pulpit. It would wrap the mantle of crepe about our manhood and the virtue of womanhood. Its conversation is polluted with obscenity and corruption.