suit your local
conditions.

~~The Talk.~~

"I am going to outline for you a picture of an object which is
everywhere recognized by good people as a symbol of defiance of the
law, a suggestion of immorality, of poverty, depravity and death.
[Draw beer keg, completing Fig. 15.] In plain words, it is a beer keg,
and its close companions are the whiskey barrel, the wine cask and the
demijohn! It well represents the liquor traffic as a whole--that
terrible curse which holds in its grip so many men and boys, whose
lives might be bright, happy and successful but for its blighting,
fatal grasp.

[Illustration: Fig. 15]

"No right-thinking man has a good word for the business which makes
good men into brutes, transforms honorable citizens into murderers,
and brings many a prosperous family to rags and misery. The
saloon-keeper himself has no good word for the business; he merely
defends it because it makes for him a good living with little work on
his part. Ofttimes he will not drink a drop himself or allow any of
his employes to touch liquor. He is in the business for the money he
can get out of it, not caring how much poverty and penury others get.
With a low idea of his duty toward his fellow-beings, he argues that
as long as men and boys will drink the deadly stuff which he sells, he
as well as anyone else, has a right to profit by their weakness and
degradation.

"'Oh,' says Shakespeare, 'that men should put an enemy in their mouths
to steal away their brains!'

"Whenever we hear of a state of lawlessness and anarchy in a city or a
nation, we can rightly conclude that the government of that city or
that nation has lost control of its people. When a man becomes a
drunkard and does things which he never thought of doing before, we
can rightly conclude that his brain has failed to govern him and that
it has been deposed by the forces of base appetite. He has lost
control of himself. That is why a drinking man cannot in these days
secure a good position with the large corporations, railroads,
manufactories and the immense commercial institutions. The great
employers of men have learned that they cannot trust men who, as
Shakespeare says, have 'put an enemy into their mouths to steal away
their brains.' Brains are in demand everywhere--brains and steady
nerves.

"So, wherever we look, we see young men learning that the way of the
saloon is the way of failure. If they can only be halted in their way
and be made to