I know it is a common remark that this is a free country, and if a man chooses to drink, let him do so and take the 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 return of husband and sons.”  What about this inhuman denial of the right to order meat, drink, clothing and home life?  Such is the sumptuary law of the saloon.

Every child in this country has a right to an education and a chance in the world.  The saloons say to hosts of children:  “You shall have neither education nor opportunity.  You shall go to the streets and sweat-shops to earn bread.  You shall live in ignorance and mid evil environment that we may gather in the wages of your fathers.”  How does this sumptuary law of the saloon compare with a sumptuary law that forbids the sale of what is of no earthly or eternal benefit to any one who uses it.