prison garb his wife fell into his arms; the agony on that man’s face I can never forget.  The child shrank from him at first, then recognizing her father, she ran to him.  As he hugged her to his bosom the little one twined her arms about his neck and said:  ’Papa, please come home with us.  Mama cries so much cause you don’t come home.’  The man sinking into a chair said:  ‘O God, am I never to see my home again?’”

This is but one of the thousands of homes destroyed every year by the drink curse.  If I could draw aside the veil and let you look into the desolate homes of your own city tonight, you would feel Ex-Governor Hanley of Indiana did not give an overwrought picture when he said:  “Personally, I have seen so much physical ruin, mental blight and moral corruption from strong drink that I hate the traffic.  I hate it for its arrogance; I hate it for its hypocrisy; I hate it for its greed and avarice; I hate it for its domination in politics; I hate it for its disregard of law; I hate it for the load it straps on labor’s back; I hate it for the wounds it has given to genius, for the human wrecks it has wrought, for the alms-houses it has peopled, for the prisons it has filled, for the crimes it has committed, the homes it has destroyed, the hearts it has broken, the malice it has planted in the hearts of men, and the dead sea fruit with which it starves immortal souls.”  With proof of the truth of this phillipic on every hand, it is a strange anomaly in our government that the degrading influence of the saloon is linked by law to the elevating influence of school, church and home.

When Jesus was on earth He came to a fig tree, dressed in rich leaves but barren of fruit; it was in fig season but the tree had only leaves.  We read that Jesus cursed the tree and it withered.  We have in this country a upas tree named the liquor traffic.  It is not a barren tree, but far worse than barren.  Its branches bend with the weight of its fruit, but not a pint, nor a quart, nor gallon, nor barrel from its boughs ever benefited a single mortal by its use as a beverage.  Its leaves drip with poison and the bones of its dead victims would build a pyramid as high as Appenines piled on the Alps.  Jesus withered the tree that produced nothing.  We license and cultivate the tree whose fruitage the Bible compares to the bite of a serpent, the sting of an adder and the poison of asps.

In the earlier days of the temperance movement, when we discussed the question along moral lines, the license advocates made it an economic question, but since the commercial world is fast becoming a great temperance league, and great industries are blacklisting the saloon as an enemy of legitimate business, the liquor advocates are taking refuge behind the Bible, and claiming that He who cursed the tree that was barren, planted the one whose root and heart, bark and branches are poisoning the blood of the nation.  They pervert scripture, take isolated passages and present an ominum gatherum of quotations to prove the Bible indorses the use of strong drink.  By the same process I can prove one of these Bible license scholars should hang himself and be in haste about it.  I read on one page of the Bible, “Judas went out and hanged himself.”  On another page I read, “Go thou and do likewise.”  And on another, “Whatsoever thou doest, do it quickly.”