Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1915 — Growing Sentiment Among Traveling Men for Temperance. [ARTICLE]

Growing Sentiment Among Traveling Men for Temperance.

The writer has met about all the traveling men who are regular visitors in this city and it is not an uncommon thing now for the liquor question to come up fdr discussion when several are riding in the bus to and from the station. It is noticeable that there has been a growing expression among these busy men in favor of the abolition of saloons and for national prohibition, and it is very jarely that any traveling salesman champions the cause of the liquor traffic.

The time was only a few years back when traveling men had to invite merchants out to have a few drinks before they could sell a bill of goods. Now if a traveling man was to show up in a store with the odor of whisky on his breath he would be ordered from the store. Both were at fault some ten or twenty years ago and both have come out of the old habit and they now disapprove it with equal ardor. The reform is very pleasing. We have always looked upon the traveling salesman as a barometer in the matter of indicating political and business conditions and even moral matters. During the summer and fall of 1912 there were a great many of them enthusiastically progressive and the wiser ones knew that there could be only one result in that campaign and that was democratic success. Last fall they were about all republican and they foretold of republican success. They are republican still and they are impatient for the time when a change can be made and a fair* tariff law passed. They see the beauties and happiness in the small dry cities of the state and they know that the saloon and the liquor business have no place in the economic make-up of the country. They know, as one remarked only this morning when he commented on the appearance of Renssealer, that a man who spends his hours loafing in a saloon can not rake his lawn and tend his garden and grow flowers and give thought to the beautiful, the healthful and the right. “I lived in a dry state for five years,” remarked another traveling man, “and I know that there is no defense for the saloons. They should be rooted out and the entire traffic banished from the land.” The traveling men see things in their keen business judgment long before they come and they expect that many of us will live to see the day when there will be no saloons, no breweries, no distilleries, and when the jails and insane hospitals and poor asylums will be almost vacated. The advent of woman’s suffrage will hasten that desirable end. It placed many Illinois cities in the dry column Tuesday and it will banish the saloons from Indiana if adopted. Temperance people should not be modest. Don’t hesitate to proclaim your convictions. Be charitable in your treatment of the subject but leave no doubt about how you stand, and your influence will help throw off the thraldom that has held our fair nation back for generations.