consequences. If one
could take alone the consequences of his sin there might be some claim
to personal liberty. But when a man's liberty involves another life
the scene changes. A young man may commit a sin in social life and by
reform be forgiven, but when that other life involved in his sin, is
seen in after years, walking the streets in painted shame, reproducing
the consequences of that man's sin, memory and conscience will combine
to give him waking hours while the world sleeps. A man may never enter
a saloon, never take a drink of intoxicating liquor, but if he votes
for the saloon his life becomes involved in the consequences of the
saloon. What are the consequences? Here is a sample. After a three
days' blizzard in one of our large cities a reformer visited a morgue
and seeing a large clothes-hamper full of dead babies he said: "What
does this mean?"

The reply came: "They were gathered from the drunkards' hovels of the
city this morning."

The visitor tells us: "Their bodies were frozen, and several arms were
sticking up out of the basket as if reaching out after life and love."

The streets of our city slums are rivers along whose shores at
midnight can be heard the death gurgle of helpless little ones, while
poverty's row is full of children cursed by inheritance, who are not
living but merely existing by scraping the moss of bare subsistence
from empty buckets in wells of poverty; and the air is freighted with
oaths and obscenities from demonized men and demi-monde women who pour
the poison of their blood into the social life of city slums.

I was both grieved and amazed when I read from the pen of a brilliant
Kentucky editor an editorial denouncing as tyrannical a sumptuary law
that "denies to a citizen the right to order his home, his meat, his
drink, his clothing, according to his conscience." I wonder if the
great editor ever considered the sumptuary law of the saloon. Every
woman who fills the holy office of wife and mother has a right to a
home. The sumptuary law of the saloon says to hundreds of thousands of
such women: "You shall not have a home; you shall live in a hovel. You
shall not order your home, your food, your drink, your clothing,
according to your conscience, but according to the best interest of
the saloon these comforts shall be ordered. You shall work all day in
the harness of oppression and when night comes instead of restful
sleep, you shall watch the stars out and wait the retu