on and the bargain is all on
one side. It's bar-gain on one side and bar-loss on the other;
ill-gotten gains on one side, mis-spent wages on the other, a mess of
pottage on one side and the birthright of some mother's boy on the
other."

A great wail is going up from the advocates of the liquor traffic that
statewide prohibition means the destruction of immense vested
interests and dire results will follow.

"This our craft is in danger," has ever been the cry against reforms
or changes in civilization since the "Shrine Makers of Ephesus."

When slavery was abolished it was said: "This means ruin to the South!
Such a confiscation of property, with every slave set free to beg at
the white man's gate, crushes every vestige of hope, and five hundred
years will not bring relief." Only fifty years have passed and the
South is richer than ever in her history.

Justice Grier of the Supreme Court said: "If loss of revenue should
accrue to the United States from a diminished consumption of ardent
spirits, she will be the gainer a thousandfold in health, wealth and
happiness of the people."

If this is true, then this question is not only a great moral question
but also a tremendous economic problem.

If production should be for use and not for abuse, the existence of
breweries and distilleries are without excuse.

If one should be rewarded on the basis of service, the saloon keeper
has no claim for even tolerance, much less reward.

If labor is the basis of value, men who live by selling liquor to
their fellowmen are leaches on the body politic, and Ishmaels in the
commercial world.

The claim that the liquor business is a benefit to a community or to
the country is in harmony with the assertion that war is a "biological
necessity" and a "stimulating source of development."

General Sherman said: "War is hell." Certainly the one now raging
between the leading nations of the old world is a hell of carnage. And
yet intemperance has destroyed more lives than all the wars of the
world since time began. It has added to the death of the body the
eternal death of the soul and then the sum of its ravages is not
complete until is added more broken hearts, more blasted hopes,
desolate homes, more misery and shame than from any source of evil in
the world. If what Sherman said of war is true, and the liquor curse
is worse than war, how can this government hope to escape punishment
for raising revenue from a business so abomina